David Cameron's membership of the exclusive Oxford University Bullingdon Club has been examined recently in the Mail, the Telegraph and the Independent. The Bullingdon Club, parodied by Evelyn Waugh as the Bollinger Club, is an invitation-only ex-Public School dining society, whose members indulge in the sport of visiting an establishment under an assumed name, smashing the place up, and over-paying for the damage with large denomination notes.

"So what," you might say, "much like Dave's teenage spliff antics, what does a bit of youthful high-jinks matter?" Now he's a respectable man and father."

Well, it does matter. Firstly because the alleged activities of the Bullingdon Club ask questions about whether Cameron's youthful indiscretions might have carried on into later life, and secondly because of the attitudes of a certain section of society to the way they can misbehave (and get away with it).

Cicero speculated recently whether Cameron's drug dalliances ended with his school days. To raise further questions, a report in Oxford University's student newspaper on the Bullingdon, written before Cameron stood for the leadership stated:

Cameron was member of the club at a time when it was de rigeur to engage in the ‘man of the people’ pursuits of washing down “a cocktail of drugs with an honest, working class box of chips and a five pound bottle of wine”.

Drugs issues aside, it is the attitudes that go with membership of such clubs that we really ought to examine. Past misdemeanours, as well as the wrecking of the White Hart Pub alluded to above, are alleged to have included smashing all the windows in Christ Church's Tom Quad, and wrecking the instruments of a string quartet, including a Stradivarius, invited to play at a Club garden party. As the Oxford paper puts it:

My source is quick to impress on me that they tend to leave one-off antique pieces untouched, preferring to infl ict more replaceable damage. I wonder how replaceable a Stradivarius is. Or 550 windows for that matter. A large part of the members’ motivation is the feudal idea that its quite alright to inflict damage on peasants’ property, provided one is able to pay for it.

In essence, such behaviour is about the swagger of exercising power, of causing distress and inconvenience to those less fortunate, and knowing that your wealth and influence leave you above the law in such matters and unlikely to have to face the consequences of your actions.

In an article linking the White Hart incident with the insensitivities and misbehaviour of the younger members of the Royal Family, Libby Purves, who describes herself as a Monarchist, writes a highly-charged attack on the section of society that views itself in this way:

They [are] rich, protected, unlikely to get prison records because their families [can] smooth the feathers of those whose property and peace they destroy. There is a sliver of British society — a very small sliver — that still lives in a different world to the vast, well-behaved middle-class majority, and disdains it. Their young run easily out of control: like the underclass yob, who at least has the excuse of poverty, these rich boys cannot see outside their own rut. It is social autism. In past centuries they might be checked by rigid conventions and parental severity. Now, they aren’t. Their parents bought in to part of modern middle-class childrearing — its indulgence and friendly unjudgmental attitudes — but unfortunately omitted to put in the time, the talk and the closeness which make such modern parenting work. The result is a tribe of well-spoken savages.

Perhaps Cameron is over all that now. But his insistance in surrounding himself with a coterie of hand-picked and like-minded public-school types, in an echo of the days of his Bullingdon Club exclusivity, doesn't bode well. And news that he considers trying to find the time to bath his children once a week is sufficient to make him a good dad makes interesting reading in the light of Libby Purves' comment.

We are currently experiencing mis-rule by a Labour Party that is privileged and sees itself as untouchable and above the law. Do we really want its continuance with Cameron's Conservatives?