Sebastian Shakespeare in his Daily Mail gossip column reports that the Bullingdon Club at Oxford (on which Waugh based the Bollinger Club in his novel Decline and Fall) may soon die out for lack of interest:
…The Buller is understood to be launching a recruitment drive among freshers to save it from extinction. Ambitious undergraduates have shunned the club, satirised by Evelyn Waugh in Decline And Fall as The Bollinger Club, because of its ‘toxic’ reputation. In the final nail in the coffin for Cameron’s ‘chumocracy’, the Bullingdon’s membership is down from 30 to just two.
Unless some of Oxford’s around 6,000 male undergrads sign up for the society’s unsavoury brand of posh hooliganism… the Bullingdon will be disbanded after more than two centuries of debauchery. One Oxford undergraduate tells me: ‘Most Bullingdon members graduated this year, and with likely no new members, this looks like it might be its last year in existence.’ Do get in touch if you know who the last two members are.
