Max Irons, one of the stars of The Riot Club, the new film about the Bullingdon Club, thinks it will serve its purpose if it sheds light on the Establishment. Really, says Daily Telegraph columnist Michael Henderson. "Not many people, one imagines, warm to the Bullingdon brigade. They looked a bunch of twerps three decades ago, and time has not been kind to them."
But so what? If you can't misbehave in your salad days, says Henderson, then it's a "poor show", wherever you are. "Young Irons, it appears, wasn't very different, being expelled from Bryanston for the usual reasons."
"I feel somewhat ashamed of having joined the club when I was at Oxford in the early Nineties," says Harry Mount in the Daily Mail. But "this clumsy, lazily plotted film" misses its target. No one posh, Bullingdon member or otherwise, would be so crass as to say in public what one Riot Club member declares: "I'm sick to f***ing death of poor people."
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Nor would Bullingdon members have battered a pub landlord unconscious the central incident in the film. The dinner at which this happens is supposedly based on a club evening in 2005.
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What actually happened was certainly bad: Bullingdon members damaged a 15th-century pub in rural Oxfordshire during a mass brawl. But they were "beating each other up, not the landlord", and what's more they "kept on breaking off from the fight to apologise to him".
"If there's one thing we all hate or at least are meant to hate," says Cosmo Landesman in The Sunday Times, "it's the spectacle of posh people behaving badly."
Landesman quotes an interview with Max Irons in which the actor expresses "moral contempt" for the amoral antics of the film's characters. "Young Irons, in his interview, says the Bullingdon is a club for people who want to trash stuff mindlessly because they can'.
Hello? Does anyone remember Keith Moon the Who drummer famous for trashing hotel rooms? If Boris [Johnson} had trashed a hotel room he would forever be a posh lout; had he gone into pop instead of politics and done it he'd be a rock legend."
Pop stars behave badly all the time, says Landesman; back in 1976 a very drunk and very rich Eric Clapton publicly declared he was sick of all those black people he actually used the term "wogs" coming into our country; "Mr Peace and Love himself", John Lennon, broke the nose of a DJ at a birthday party. Yet their sins are forgotten and forgiven.
For "those on the liberal left", however, Johnson's and Cameron's membership of the Bullingdon will never be.
Landesman is right, of course, about the "bash-the-posh populism" of The Riot Club. The irony is that at least two of the stars in it, Max Irons (son of Jeremy) and Freddie Fox (son of Edward) like so many successful actors and actresses these days are themselves posh or semi-posh: they come from highly privileged backgrounds and probably wouldn't have made it to the top if they didn't.
Tabloid money: 'it's time to give our MPs a pay rise'
David Cameron allowed broadcaster Andrew Marr the use of No. 10 on Tuesday night to launch his new novel, all about a PM who has a stroke, says Ephraim Hardcastle in the Daily Mail.
"Is this an appropriate use of the PM's official residence? And who is picking up the bill? A No. 10 spokesman says: We are paying for the reception and a stroke charity involved is paying for the canaps.' Charity, the magic word which opens all doors."
"I never thought I'd write this but it's time to give our MPs a pay rise," says Alison Phillips in the Daily Mirror. "Look around the political benches and largely they're made up of people I wouldn't want running an egg-and-spoon race, let alone running the country Marcial Boo, chief executive of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, has called the MPs' current £67,000 a miserly amount', which is clearly idiotic: £67,000 a year is a big salary [but] many state school head teachers earn around that mark (almost 1,000 are paid six figures).
Successful builders and estate agents are on about what MPs want. Vets and lawyers earn way more. And although cats need to be de-wormed running the country seems a whole lot more important to me Of course we'd like MPs to follow their hearts and their beliefs to Parliament. But that ain't happening, so the only option to coax them away from proper jobs' is to make it more financially appealing."
"The director of children's services in Rotherham is a woman called Joyce Thacker," says Rod Liddle in The Sun.
"She presided over five years of failure as more than 1,000 of the town's kids were sexually abused by Asian gangs. She did nothing. But she is also the woman responsible for removing foster children from a couple because they were supporters of Ukip. If you want to know what's wrong with the country's social services, look no further than the idiotic, ideologically warped Thacker. And yet she is still in a job that pays £130,000 a year. Incredible."
