| The One Club To Rule Them All |
 | | Boris Johnson at the Conservative Party's leadership headquarters on Tuesday. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images | |
| There's a question I've gotten a few times since moving to London that, initially baffling, is starting to make more sense in light of Boris Johnson's ascent to prime minister — which is also baffling in a way, given his overwhelmingly negative poll numbers, his mixed record in office and his tremendous unpopularity within his own party. |
| Here's the question, which always comes after telling someone that I'm a journalist: "Have you thought about running for office?" |
| As an American, it would be unthinkable, and not just because journalists are rarely well-liked enough. Running for office would be like announcing that I'd never really been sincere about my obligations to put readers' interests first, that I'd always wanted to join the powerful rather than act as a check on them. I wouldn't have credibility either as a reporter or a politician. |
| Here in Britain, no one thinks twice about certain kinds of journalists running for office. Mr. Johnson made his name in journalism (a name associated with charges of fabulism). So did Michael Gove, a member of Mr. Johnson's cabinet. And Winston Churchill. And Ed Balls, a former senior figure in the Labour Party. |
| This hints at an unusual and important feature of British political culture — maybe the most important feature of all, particularly if you want to understand how Mr. Johnson became prime minister. |
| Members of the ruling elite might, on paper, belong to groups or institutions that are at odds with one another. Opposing political parties, say, or government ministers and the reporters assigned to cover them. In practice, however, they are also widely understood to belong to an elite club that is rooted in — and often explicitly an extension of — the old class system. |
| If you're American, you might think this doesn't sound so different from the United States, where columnists and lawmakers mix at Georgetown cocktail parties or the ultra-wealthy hobnob with presidential candidates. |
| Trust us. It's different. In America, you buy or work your way into a network of transactional, superficial relationships, in which the powerful trade favors. In Britain, you're most likely born into the club, you're always a member and your allegiances are to the club as an institution. The club isn't an occasional means to an end; it's the whole point. |
| That's a big part of why it's considered no big deal for certain kinds of journalists to enter politics. They were already members of the club, which is what matters. And it's why those journalists are expected to consider their club membership their real, primary responsibility — and whatever job they hold at the moment just a way to fulfill the duties of membership, which are: (1) upholding the hallowed cultural and political authority of the club; (2) being in charge of the United Kingdom. |
| Membership is so linked to the class system that it typically traces back to a handful of small, ultra-fancy schools — members might literally have known one another for life, and have grown up being told, correctly, that they were going to run the country. Odds are good that their families have known one another for decades. One of those schools, an expensive high school called Eton College, is so synonymous with the ruling elite that its students are traditionally given a day off whenever an alumnus becomes prime minister. That includes Mr. Johnson, though there will be no day off this time as Eton is out for summer. |
| And you may have seen the famous 1987 photo of a tuxedo-wearing boys' club at Oxford University known as the Bullingdon Club. It features two future prime ministers (Mr. Johnson and David Cameron) with eight other boys who also assumed powerful roles as adults. British universities are rife with such clubs, whose parties tend to be famously debaucherous and destructive — a way for members to flaunt that, as inborn elites, they live with more privileges and fewer consequences than the rest of us. |
| In theory, these institutions are meant to instill young members with the gravity of their responsibility to lead Britain. And maybe it does. But it also teaches them that they are owed stewardship of the country, a right that derives from their membership in a closed circle of elites. |
| That clubbiness carries through to adulthood, when a certain shared heritage continues to bond them, even as they run against one another for public office or take on jobs that require them to oversee one another's companies or institutions — including as, say, a journalist. |
| But — and I want to triple-underscore this point — this only applies to a certain, prep-school-dominated sliver of British journalism. You should continue to treat outlets like The Economist, the BBC, The Financial Times and others as gold standards of journalist excellence. And for every Eton insider in the British press, there are probably 100 reporters who got there through hard work, skill and unshakable ethical principles. |
| Still, in certain moments, you can see the club's influence on journalism here. |
| Do you remember #PigGate? In 2015, British outlets reported that Mr. Cameron, as part of his membership in a different college-age, elite society, had "inserted a private part of his anatomy" into the mouth of a dead pig. |
| The sourcing for the story spoke volumes about the way that elite club membership and political journalism can sometimes overlap in Britain. Allegedly, an anonymous Oxford school chum of Mr. Cameron recounted the story to Michael Ashcroft, who is a politician and a journalist, as well as a fantastically rich businessman, all at once. It was treated as at least vaguely credible when Mr. Ashcroft's story appeared in the Daily Mail because, well, he's a member of the club. He would know. |
| More often, that clubbiness manifests as like-minded politicians and journalists working in concert — after all, they're in this together. That was a crucial part of Mr. Johnson's success. To say that he could rely on the support of The Telegraph, a major newspaper that employed him in the 1990s, would be something of an understatement. As a cabinet minister, Mr. Johnson would write opinion columns that The Telegraph would display on the top of its front page, sometimes alongside a full-bleed photo of Mr. Johnson and large-font bullet points of his argument. His opinions — lambasting a political rival or issuing implausible promises about Brexit — were presented as headline-scale fact. |
| If you don't believe me, check out this Telegraph front page in which Mr. Johnson compares himself to Moses. Or the front page that ran when he won the contest to become prime minister, whose headlines state that he will "unite the country" and "energize Britain." |
| To underscore the distinction between the elite class in media and its professional reporters, I've found that many of the latter take a pretty skeptical view of Mr. Johnson, whose relationship with the truth can be tenuous. |
| And that's the point: everywhere you look, you see institutional support for Mr. Johnson that would be inexplicable without that chummy ruling elite. |
| That club gave Mr. Johnson a political base more important than the electorate (which broadly dislikes him) and that encompasses but exists above the professional political and media classes, both of which have a tense relationship with him. |
| His status within the club and his ability to work it have allowed him to thrive despite, and maybe because of, a record that otherwise might have sunk him. |
| It's not that this club is a shadowy conspiracy, some sort of tea-drinking Illuminati with its tentacles wrapped around British democracy. The truth is far duller. Its power comes from the cultural momentum of the old upper class and the social norms that still defer to it as the presumed holder and source of that power. |
| As an American in London, it can look like a subtle — but, once you see it, dramatic — inversion of American norms, where wealth and power win you elite membership rather than the other way around. It's what gives British politics its surreal air of there being no real stakes, a law of no-political-gravity on which Mr. Johnson has long relied. It's a system where a journalist can run for office and Mr. Johnson can become prime minister. Even if people can be uncomfortable with the outcomes, it's basically accepted that that's the system. |
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