Nine out of 13 post-war Prime Ministers have been to Oxford but none went to Cambridge. The last Cambridge man to occupy No 10 was Stanley Baldwin.
Now James Pembroke, a former president of the True Blue dining club at Cambridge, writes in his memoir, Growing Up in Restaurants, The Story of Eating out in Britain from 55 BC to Nowadays, that table manners may be the key to it all. He claims Cambridge diners are more civilised than Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, which produced Messrs Cameron, Osborne and Johnson.
The True Blues had no tradition of breaking up furniture, he claims. “Ninety per cent of Cambridge undergraduates of all backgrounds adhered to a code of drabness which would have amply satisfied Chairman Mao,” he writes.
Pembroke, now publisher of The Oldie, adds: “With the exception of Bamber Gascoigne and Marc Boxer, few True Blue Men have achieved greatness. The Bullingdon was founded by thrusting Victorian Tories; the True Blue by foppish Georgian Whigs. We were too busy getting trashed to trash other chaps’ rooms.”
