The Riot Club: Douglas Booth makes a beautiful baddie but the movie lacks bite and authenticity

The Riot Club: Oxford has never seemed so decadent, writes insider Joe Lloyd, but the film inspired by the infamous Bullingdon barely scratches the surface of drinking and dining society culture

Men behaving badly doesn’t begin to describe the (variously) disgusting, sociopathic and violent events making up the action of The Riot Club. The film, which opened this weekend, is based on Laura Wade’s acclaimed play Posh, but got mixed reviews in Sunday’s papers. For Mark Kermode in the Observer the film lacked ‘bite’, while for the Sunday Times' Camilla Long it was ‘hobbled, numb, dumb, inaccurate’ – ‘a film about Oxford that feels as if it has been conceived and created by people who have never actually visited the city or met a tutor or undergraduate, and have never remotely come into contact with an aristocrat or any of its drinking societies.’

So what is the truth about the notorious Bullingdon Club , the student members’ club upon which Wade based her play?  Oxford graduate Joe Lloyd lifts the lid on the history and culture of Oxbridge’s frequently shocking drinking societies…

In The Riot Club, based on Laura Wade’s incendiary drama Posh , a raft of young actors recreates the Bullingdon, the dining society which famously claims David Cameron, Boris Johnson and George Osborne among its alumni. (A well-known photograph shows Cameron and Johnson in full Bullingdon regalia of white tie and tails, gazing moodily into the middle distance with every apparent expectation of running the country in the not too distant future). 

The Riot Club takes the infamously sexist, drunken and snobbish antics of Bullingdon and takes them to extremes, in the process tackling class, elitism and the establishment, although the handsomeness of the cast threatens to charm as much as repulse. Yet as odious as Wade’s Riot Club are, they represent only the tip of Oxbridge’s drinking society culture. Beneath the Bullingdon there’s a whole iceberg of bizarre, debauched and plain desperate societies.

Two types of secret clubs run rampant in Oxford and Cambridge. First, there are the all-male dining socs. Drawing most of their members from a handful of public schools, very few students are admitted each year. The societies themselves can be fabulously wealthy – the Pitt Club, Cambridge’s most esteemed, possesses is own neo-classical headquarters, albeit one whose ground floor is leased to a branch of Pizza Express. Founded in 1835 to uphold the political principles of Pitt the Younger, it gradually degenerated into a drinking and dining organisation – although in 2011 they set up a scholarship that will fund a Politics graduate student through their degree.

At Oxford, contrastingly, most of the clubs are officially banned from the university, and so operate in private houses and restaurants. Oxford’s equivalent to the Pitt, the Gridiron, serves as the pool from which other dining clubs source their members. They vary both in accessibility and ethos. The Stoics, who invite numerous non-members to black tie drinks throughout the year, initiate recruits by sitting them in a graveyard and forcing them to down a silver cow’s horn of liquor. Piers Gaveston, named for Edward II’s gay lover, cultivate a Bacchanalian image, hosting an annual summer ball famed for its excess.

Beyond these elusive and exclusive groups, who use history and secrecy to retain a sort of allure, Oxbridge’s collegiate nature allows countless drinking societies to flourish. Often based around sports teams, these groups are most famed for their horrific initiation ceremonies. The Wyverns, from Madgalene College Cambridge, might offer the worst: well-soused initiate’s must devour a twenty-plus course meal. Dishes include raw squid, dog food, sheep’s eyeballs and pig snouts coated in wasabi, with a live goldfish as the pièce de résistance. While the Bullingdon and its ilk strive for decadence and mystique, these societies are a magnification of the lad-culture endemic to Britain’s universities. It was as a member of one of these, Keble’s Steamers, that Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls was photographed wearing a Nazi uniform.

Allegations of misogyny amongst these societies are entirely founded. While male clubs may be named after mythical birds or Greek philosophers, their female counterparts are more likely to be dubbed ‘Winston’s Wenches’ or “Strumpettes.’ Repellent incidents abound: in 2009, members of Hertford College’s Penguin Club were suspended after a “list of fitties” they hoped to seduce was leaked, with “Only if we’re desperate” scribed next to one. They had previously approached underage schoolgirls and tried to take them to clubs, including three daughters of college staff. Last year St Hugh’s Black Cygnets invited first-year girls to dress up as foxes and be hunted around the town, “evading mauling” before “eventual capture by the huntsman.” The college principal called them “repugnant, sexist and secretive.” And only a few months ago, Cambridge’s Wyvern Club were filmed chanting “Rape”, “too young” and “fifteen years old” en masse while walking down Oxford’s High Street.

Cameron, Johnson and Osborne are not the first members of the privileged elite to graduate from the Bullingdon’s finishing school. Rasputin-killing Prince Felix Yusupov, colonial magnate Cecil Rhodes, the Labour peer Lord Longford, broadcast David Dimbleby were all members, and  Evelyn Waugh , that razor-edged sniper of 20th century British mores, immortalised the club in Decline and Fall (1928). Thinly disguised as the Bollinger Club, here its members are revealed as a bunch of “uncouth peers” and “illiterate lairds”, embarking on philistine rampages under the banner of hedonism. They throw a Matisse into the privy, devastate grand pianos and bash foxes to death with champagne bottles. 

It’s difficult to verify many of the stories surrounding the present day Bullingdon. According to some sources, would-be members have to ritually burn a £50 note before a beggar’s eyes; we can only hope that this is exaggeration. They certainly meet for their annual supper, although the amount of property they do destroy varies year to year. And the tradition of trashing the rooms of potential recruits remains.