“What’s a Libertine?” a small, pigtailed girl asks her mum, brandishing a page from a uni newspaper. “It says here daddy was a Libertine.” The mum - Sophie Whitehouse, played by Sienna Miller - is not going to have to explain that daddy spent the indie sleaze years in a trilby hat shooting up smack in Camden. No, darling, the truth is so much worse.
Anatomy of a Scandal (no relation to A Very British Scandal or a A Very English Scandal) is Netflix’s latest psychological thriller, adapted from the 2018 novel by Sarah Vaughan by David E Kelley (the guy behind Big Little Lies and The Undoing). The story focuses on an MP, James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend) who is accused of raping his aide, Olivia (Naomi Scott) who he was also having an affair with. The story follows the devastation of the accusation as it threatens to turn his and his wife, Sophie’s lives upside down as the case makes it to the high court.
There is nothing likeable about James and even Sophie from the start - very much the smug, loaded politico couple that start to appear that little too often in Private Eye for securing injunctions for their misdeeds. And then that’s before we get to their meet-cute in a university flashback: they lock eyes and swoon while a guy drinks beer poured over another guy’s arse. "They're anal chugging!" one character explains to another bemused character.
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The anal chuggees - and James, and his Prime Minster best mate, Tom Southern (Geoffrey Streatfield) - are revealed to be part of Oxford University’s Libertine fraternity. The over-entitled group of boys carouse around campus in suit and tails, throwing wild parties for themselves where they get wasted: snorting coke, sexually assaulting waitresses and pouring out bottles of Bollinger (RRP £40, btw). “Let’s drink it and piss it up the wall,” an extremely Boris Johnson-looking fella says, while another guy gets his dick out. Then they all chant, “Omertà of the Libertines!” which is both a rally cry and pledging a vow of silence for all events that take place that evening. What happens in Oxford, stays in Oxford. They continue to smash up the place; throw a bunch of money at the manhandled waitress and continue their rampage into the night.
Is the Libertine fraternity real?
But, you cry, this is all just a fictional group! From a fictional novel! Well, yes and no. While there’s obviously no real-life Libertine fraternity of Oxford University, it’s in no small part based on the real-life Bullingdon Club; and the similarities are endless. Starting with the fact two Prime Ministers (David Cameron and Boris Johnson) and one chancellor (George Osborne) were fully paid up members of the group - and there’s pictures that prove it.
John Bowen//Getty Images
The IRL Bullingdon Club is an extremely dated institution - an all-male private dining club that started as a hunting and cricket club - that was set up in 1780 as a sort of rampage night for wealthy young men attending Oxford Uni. In 1927, The Times reported that the group smashed up the windows in Christ Church. They trashed restaurants, left a trail of broken glass, red wine and blood in the establishments, then bunged a load of money at the owners to “pay for the damages”. By the ‘80s, things had got even more out of hand.
The Guardian called the group: “champagne-swilling, restaurant-trashing, 'pleb'-taunting elitism” and even Boris Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, couldn’t spin the future PM’s role in the club out of it, as he wrote in his book The Rise of Boris Johnson: “I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. [...] A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging [pulling the pants down] of anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men.”
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The first post-Buller Prime Minister didn’t fare much better. After managing to get that infamous photo banned - when he heard Labour were planning to use it for an election campaign in 2007 - he’s since been wringing his hands about the whole sorry series of events. In his 2019 memoir, For The Record, he said: “The club haunted me for most of my political life. When I look now at the much-reproduced photograph taken of our group of appallingly over-self-confident ‘sons of privilege’, I cringe. If I had known at the time the grief I would get for that picture, of course I would never have joined. But life isn’t like that.”
In 2016, Ralph Perry-Robinson, a Buller man in the ‘80s, broke the Omerta code and told The Daily Beast among other revelations that sex workers were routinely hired and used for sex acts in public for their parties. “We always hire whores… prostitutes were paid extra by members who wanted to use them.”
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The Bullingdon Club doesn’t exist on the same scale anymore, and in 2018, the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) announced that members of the Bullingdon Club would be banned from holding office within the Association. But there are still rumours of a very small contingent of characters keeping the name going but on a much smaller scale.
Sarah Vaughan, author of Anatomy of a Scandal, said of her inspiration for a posh boy smash-up club: “I started writing the book in 2016 in the lead-up to the EU referendum. David Cameron was in charge, an old Etonian prime minister who went to Oxford. George Osborne was Chancellor. There had been a bit of a furore about that very famous Bullingdon picture with Cameron and Boris Johnson on the steps, and I just had that in my mind so much as I was writing it.”
Anatomy of a Scandal is now streaming on Netflix.
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