Young Conservatives can be a strange breed of geek. No wonder David ... - Telegraph.co.uk (blog)

David Cameron and Boris Johnson in their student activist days

A confession: I once went to a Cambridge University Conservative Association dinner. The guest of honour was a neophyte MP called George Osborne. He had the fleshy, pale look of a classic young Conservative, with the kind of mean eyes that suggested he enjoyed sending orphans down mines. I can't remember the conversation, but we didn't exactly bond. The whole thing confirmed my view that there was something odd about being an active member of the Conservative Party at 19. Years that ought to be spent occupying lecture halls and smoking powerful dope with a girl called Twig were being wasted on port and Wagner. No wonder so many Tory politicians end up being caught in bed with their Latvian masseuse. These poor boys have delayed their adolescence until their forties, when it comes tumbling out in a nightmare of sucked toes and Chelsea football shirts.

So I was initially disturbed by Chris and Joe, the stars of Wonderland: Young, Bright and On the Right (BBC2). They were the epitome of what in the 1990s we called Tory Boy – the kids with unplaceable accents who hung pictures of Margaret Thatcher on their college walls. Chris and Joe were stars of the Cambridge and Oxford Conservative Associations and both volunteered to show the cameras around their bizarre universe. Tellingly, the things that define philosophical conservatism were never mentioned: economic theory, faith, love of the countryside, even cultural chauvinism. When Joe hung a cross on his wall he reassured us that he doesn't believe in God. "You always trust a man with a cross," he said cleverly, totally oblivious to the massive sex abuse scandal that has nearly destroyed the Roman Catholic Church.

The Telegraph's Iain Hollingshead is right that the show's producers went out of their way to make Oxbridge look arcane and silly. Nobody wears a suit on a punt, but there was little Chris sitting plumply in a suit on the river like it was the most natural thing in the world. From Joe we heard hints that there was another world out there of posh, drunken Oxford Tories with the sexual and social manners of Ernst Rohm. Yet Joe was a strangely sexless, sober character with the dress sense of a gay accountant in the 1950s. To hear him recounting, tearfully, that the Oxford Conservatives was packed with snobs left me shouting "No sh*t Sherlock," at the TV.

Chris and Joe were trying to construct artificial identities that belonged to another class and another era (another country, you might say) – and this made their conservatism seem like a grotesque affectation. Chris liked speaking "propah" and being different, and he seemed happiest when waving his arms about in the Union. Joe – who was articulate and rather loveable – came from a poor, broken home and was eligible for free meals. The jackets and natty handkerchiefs elevated him among his preppy competitors. In both cases, what the Conservatives gave them was a sense of confidence and (I suspect) of intellectual superiority above their peers. They were even able to play the parts of future leaders, conspiring and planning their way to the top. They were models of Thatcherite meritocracy. When Joe spoke of his belief that any man can become anything he wants to be, he had my sympathy.

Alas, there is a gulf between the Tory ideal and the Tory reality, so I doubt either boy will make the cabinet. Beyond Oxbridge, the Parliamentary Conservative Party is dominated by city gent/public school types – not geeky activists. David Cameron barely registered at OUCA during his time as an undergrad, and his rise to the top is paradigmatic of the triumph of breeding over leaflet delivery. I noticed the same at Cambridge, where many of my generation who are now seeking high office avoided student politics for fear of catching dandruff. The former activists, meanwhile, are all still local activists.

The problem with this documentary was that it not only exploited Chris and Joe's fantasies, but it validated them (for a season). By filming these amateurs at play it seemed to buy into the absurd idea that there is a straight line from President of OUCA to Prime Minister of Great Britain. But by also broadcasting their strangeness for us all to see, it simultaneously ruined any chance they had of making it in real politics. The producers found two confused young men – both desperate for attention – stuck them in front of a camera and encouraged them to make total fools of themselves. It was Big Brother on a punt. And no Conservative Association is ever going to nominate Sophie "Dogface" Reade to be its MP, are they?

But in its own cynical way, Young, Bright and on the Right touched upon some sad truths about class, youth activism and power in modern Britain. Our politics is dysfunctional partly because it is dominated by a mix of tribal apparatchiks and party aristocrats. They rarely engage with ideas beyond power theory, have little cause to encounter daily realities and are often quite odd. British politics has become a stage upon which perpetual students play out their psychodramas.