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[/audioplayer]Whenever the curtain is pulled back on youthful political activism, the picture is ugly. Three years ago, in Young, Bright and On the Right, the BBC followed students at Oxbridge fighting like vipers to get ahead in their university Conservative clubs. Along with the inevitable three-piece suits, wildly invented accents and endless talk of what ‘the party’ expected, there was also that characteristic lack of awareness that ‘the party’, like the rest of the world, remained largely indifferent to them.
Now the suicide of a 21-year-old called Elliott Johnson has brought this world back before the public gaze. Every detail speaks of a scene which is unpleasant even before it is tragic. Anyone who has been involved in student politics or observed it from a distance will recognise the traits: the hysterical insistence on loyalty, the pettiness, double-dealing, levels of corruption to shame most third-world leaders and always, but always, the endless threats by everyone to sue everyone else.
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