Setayesh Dashti’s Reviews > Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK > Status Update

Sunak's parents - like Priti Patel and Suella Braverman - come from one very specific, small group: East African Asians. These are the so called 'twice migrants’, who moved from British-ruled India to East Africa and then, mostly in the 1970s, on to the UK … So this group's foundational trauma was a conflict with other “people of colour”.

[Boris] Johnson had the additional advantage of periodic scandals, which he defused with irony and which built his name recognition. He spun rule-breaking as an upper-class prank, like stealing a policeman's helmet on Boat Race Night. His Bullingdon ethos had survived intact, its truth validated by his life path: The rules don't apply to our class.

This fraction of the city where most students lived appeared untouched by anything since the Civil War. Oxford had 'never been bombed or burnt’, noted Jan Morris. Its preservation wasn't entirely accidental: British powerbrokers had a sentimental attachment to their former playground.