Tonight:
5°c
The Bullingdon revisited ... a TV embarrassment for David Cameron
Joe Murphy, Political Editor22 Jul 2009
Younger days: Boris Johnson and David Cameron will be depicted in the drama
It is the chapter in his life that David Cameron would really rather we all forgot about.
After all, it is hard to be a man of the people after belonging to a club devoted to overprivileged young men who delight in dressing up in waistcoat and tails and trashing restaurants.
Alas for the Tory leader, his youthful exploits as a member of Oxford University's infamous Bullingdon Club are to be turned into a no-holds-barred TV film.
Other big-name Tories also stand to be embarrassed. London Mayor Boris Johnson and George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, were both members of the club and are set to play unwitting starring roles.
Only the part of Mr Johnson has been cast so far. He is to be played by Christian Brassington, 26, who hilariously recreated a young Tony Blair swaggering Mick Jagger-style in his underpants while an undergraduate at Oxford in the comedy-documentary Tony Blair: Rock Star for Channel 4 in 1995.
Mr Cameron has gone to great lengths to play down his membership of the Bullingdon. A photograph of him and Mr Johnson posing with Brideshead Revisited swagger in the 150-year-old club's flamboyant outfit was withdrawn from circulation after pressure from the Tory leader's office, though it is rumoured Labour plans to wheel out pirate copies on election posters.
Within hours of the picture being taken, the young men were said to have gone out to wreak havoc on Oxford. One threw a plant pot through a restaurant window and police were called.
"The party ended up with a number of us crawling through the hedges of the botanical gardens, and trying to escape police dogs," Mr Johnson once said. "In the cells we became pathetic namby-pambies.''
The Bullingdon modus operandi is to book a restaurant under a false name, smash it up, and throw large amounts of money at the owners.
Film-maker John Dower said: "Everyone has seen the Bullingdon Club picture but we go behind the scenes to see what it was really like."
Mr Cameron once said: "I did things when I was young that I should not have done and that I regret."
The comment was in reply to questions about whether he took drugs as a youngster rather than his membership of the Bullingdon Club. The sentiment is almost certainly the same.
A senior Tory official groaned when told about the film, saying: "David will probably not be tuning in."
