Interview: Tom Mendelsohn, Oxbridge hater

“If you wear red trousers you are automatically a cunt.” 

About a month ago journalist Tom Mendelsohn wrote a column describing Oxbridge as, more or less, full of red trouser-wearing twats. He slammed the “finishing school for rich kids preparing for lives in power” as toxic, self-important right-wing establishments where an elitist upper middle class cement undeserved privilege.

While admitting that “there are posh twats at every university”, his column (or ‘trollumn’) labelled everyone at Oxbridge with one brush as the sort of right-wing bigot who wears deck shoes in a non-ironic way and who rents out the VIP area of nightclubs with Daddy’s money.

I met Tom, himself the product of a private school/Oxbridge education, to discover why he wrote the vitriolic column.

Continuing the theme of the article, he tells me that “people with Barbour jackets and floppy hair tend to revel in their privilege”, clarifying that “It’s a handy signifier of being a dickhead.”

“C*nts”

“At Oxbridge you are never more than 74cm from an appalling opinion” he had written. Of course Oxbridge does have its fair share of appalling opinions – only last week in Camera smoking area I heard a Union-type turning his nose up at someone who was so ‘old money’.

But to give a balanced account of Oxbridge would of course not generate much traffic to the Independent’s website. If there’s an impassioned left-wing extremist going spare in their office, you might as well put them to good use.

“There was always anti-feminist stuff at Oxford” he tells me. “Like ‘get in the kitchen’ and ‘all northerners are monkeys’. A public school background gave me a lot of ease with using the word ‘pleb’”.

Tom was incredulous when I suggested no one said these things seriously anymore. You’d be hard pressed to find a student not acutely aware of Oxford’s elitist image and who could use ‘pleb’ without a heavy, heavy dose of sarcasm.

While admitting that “it could be a generational thing”, he remained unconvinced. “The evidence is that elitist attitudes have not faded away”.

He realized he jeopardized writing an insightful piece about Oxbridge’s domination by the middle and upper classes by claiming in his article that ‘university life revolves around the Union’.

‘I regret making the digs at the Union but you can’t deny there’s a certain obsession with it’.

Despite that last misguided clause, he clearly wasn’t a nutcase who had just discovered Das Kapital. He dressed regularly, had a girlfriend and was easy to get on with. Did he get rejected from the Bullingdon or does he really just despise posh people?

Another shot of our handsome interviewee.

“The OUCA (Oxford University Conservative Association) were super racist in my day. One society, which shall remain nameless, was reputed to have their ‘Port & Policy’ meetings and they would put on ‘The Triumph Of The Will’ [The Nazi Propaganda film] and goosestep drunk around people’s rooms.”

He became harder to disagree with when talking about various conservative associations’ activities, especially in light of the recent news of this year’s Bullingdon Club initiations was to burn a £50 note in front of a tramp.

“Many young Tories at Oxbridge in the 1980s would wear a t-shirt saying ‘Hang Mandela’”.

“I’d like to abolish private schools because they’re un-meritocratic and we should tax the rich so they don’t have £30k a year to swindle on their fucking offspring”.

Vive la revolution!

You can read the full interview here.