Bye bye, Buller

RIP the Bullingdon Club, 1780–2017.

It isn’t quite dead — but it is down to its last two members. That’s barely enough people to trash each other’s bedrooms, let alone a whole restaurant, as the Bullingdon was wont to do, according to legend — not that we ever did that sort of thing in my time in the club, from 1991 to 1993.

The Bullingdon, or Buller, as it is sometimes known, just couldn’t survive 11 years of bad headlines — from 2005 to 2016, when three of its former members, David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson, were the most powerful Conservatives in the country. For more than a decade the Bullingdon exerted a totemic power so mighty that it spawned several conspiracy theories. One website, ‘Abel Danger’, claims Bullingdon members are placed ‘in positions of power and influence throughout the world and controlled and blackmailed into executing the plans of the power behind the club — the House of Rothschild’.