How Louis Trup Won The OUSU Election

And made Oxford a little less serious. It wasn’t very hard.


Well that was a bit of fun wasn’t it? The OUSU elections were for once made interesting all because Louis Trup ran, and was rewarded with winning. He won 1,685 votes, with the closest rival Jane ‘Jane4Chang’ Cahill getting seven hundred fewer, at 975.

LJT’s mostly-joking campaign was successful not for anything Trup himself was particularly, but mainly for what he wasn’t – the other three hack-candidates.

The winning team

Cherwell of course, in their tradition of utmost sincerity, backed Jane4Chang.

Cherwell and the OxfordStudent are at times quite good papers, but they’re mostly full of people who want to be journalists, and so are doing their best impressions of their idea of conventional, newspaper journalists.

“Look at me, I am reporting a news story about the new vending machine in Corpus Christi’s JCR/about Ed Milliband’s policies. Please hire me, can’t you see I’m just like a proper journalist?”

Equally Alex Bartram, Jane Cahill and Nathan Aykehurst were doing their best impressions of politicians.

From the faux-sincerity about ‘bringing change in the issues YOU care about’ to the personality mould of middle-of-the-road, must-not-offend-anyone super beige, it was instantly both forgettable and repulsive.

Even the way Jane Cahill speaks and uses her hands while talking is horribly David Cameron-esque.

Jane4Chang’s double act – without a laughter track

Oxford is in general a very serious university – people do their work seriously, they do hobbies very seriously, and they even have fun in a very serious way a lot of the time.

Trup is just quite a normal guy, doing what you should be doing when you’re 19 or 20 – having a laugh. When lined up against the wretch-a-thon of Bartram, Aykehurst, Chang, it was inevitably refreshing.

People didn’t have to find him always hilarious to enjoy him holding a mirror up to the candidates, hacks and journalists who were pretending OUSU was something it’s not.

When each candidate had spent two minutes during the hustings trying to convince the audience why they would change your life for the better in charge, Trup did the only thing appropriate – he fetched the guitar and did a David Brent.

If he resigns, it would be a real shame, for OUSU would be back in the hands of the same bubble of ultra-serious hacks.

Cherwell editor Nick Hilton tweeted this just after Trup’s victory:

To ‘govern’? Does OUSU ‘govern’ us? I must have missed that memo.

Those who want Trup to resign want a return to their ‘old seriousness’. 1,685 people are quite enjoying a change.