Oxford university has produced 31 prime ministers, while Cambridge has only really managed to rustle up a handful of state traitors and David Mitchell. Such a disposition is evident on the banks of the Thames today – hundreds of students are holding little navy flags with the Oxford logo on it. And then there are the college sweaters: Merton, Oriel, Magdalen, Pembroke, Brasenose. It takes me longer to detect the Cambridge students, though they are here – their merchandising efforts are half-arsed, all a disorganised afterthought. I think I saw a Cambridge University hat, but I cannot say that with certainty.
It is the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and I am somewhere between Putney and Chiswick in west London. The Cambridge men (more impressive than the student spectators) are about to sail (oops) to victory. But the Oxford women have to win their race first, breaking ten years of Cambridge dominance. Everyone does a bad job at pretending to care about this – “Chapeau, ladies!” one man honks as they go past, and even his heart isn’t really in it. Everyone is here for the alcohol first and the men’s race second. The Blue Boat pub is forcing its patrons to decant their pints from one expensive plastic cup into another, cheaper plastic cup. No one explains why.
Rowing ranks – by my calculations – among the worst spectator sports, second only to cross-country skiing. At this point in the course the Thames is 150 metres wide. So you are watching boats that are rather far away go past at a pace that I am sure is impressive, but looks quite slow from here. The Cambridge men are so far ahead they might as well be rowing to victory on a different continent. “Best place to watch the boat race,” a sign directs me. I quickly learn that this is a lie, and that there is no good place to watch the boat race. A vague half-formed cheer goes up from the crowd as the crews pass – I still don’t believe anyone means it.
It is a windy day in early April but the patrons of the Blue Boat are attempting to declare the arrival of the British summertime. I spot an old classmate, a competitively uninteresting person who happened to be a major rowing enthusiast (that makes one!). I think he works for a bank now, but I am not minded to ask. The wind is picking up, the crowd is conspicuously drunk, I am advertised “SANGRIA, only £6, extra boozy wobbly-boat sangria”. In this slice of the universe, copy editors do not exist. But it must have been a good day for business at the bunting factory – the Crab Tree pub is decorated in kilometres of the stuff, Oxford navy.
Parsing the crowd here is a process of subtle distinction, an exercise in gilet taxonomy. On one hand you have plummy women on day release from the Pony Club, chittering on with their clipped accents and handsome, lacrosse-playing daughters – Lily, Milly, Molly and Poppy; this is Surrey rah. And these are the cheek-kissing, Guilford-dwelling, blonde-highlighted, netball captains of life – Oxford alum, usually. And I wouldn’t want to be a bottle of Maison Mirabeau rosé in their company. I know it’s a cliché to call this type of woman horsey. But worse than that, I suspect it’s unfair to horses – the skittish and nervous creatures they are. No, these spectators have never had a bout of social anxiety in their lives. And they are thriving today.
They are outnumbered, however. At Henley Regatta in Oxfordshire over the summer you will find waves of ruddy-faced men in boaters and blazers; dappled sunlight on the water; and the ambient sense that maybe all of England could be this nice forever. But Henley is a monument to a type of person that doesn’t exist any more – a mode of Englishness fast dying out.
Instead, here in London, much further downstream on the banks of the Thames, there are young men in finance-bro fleeces – deracinated, unpatriotic, citizens of nowhere – thinking about their future in private equity; looking like they are about to yell “sell yen!” down the phone. I look up at the apartments looming over the river and see balconies full of men in practical loafers and quarter-zips. Plenty are happy to say the British elite is lost in time, full of people who still think Lord Salisbury is prime minister. The plummy, the ruddy, the round, and all those nasty adjectives. No, no, here they are rich, metropolitan and could just as well be watching a 197-year-old annual boat race in Singapore. These kids could walk into JP Morgan in lower Manhattan, and no one would even know they are English.
All of this makes the sheer number of Americans here hard to miss. I make a polite enquiry: “Are you students?” No, as it turns out. Just fans – and not of rowing, of course. The boat race is a window into a very American fascination with Oxford University – for some reason, Cambridge doesn’t really do it for them (let’s chalk that up to the prime minister thing for now). They like the old buildings, the robes, the long tables, the stained glass, the oak panels, the secret clubs and all the hand-me-down self-regard that comes with it. A straight-to-Netflix romcom My Oxford Year attempted to ventriloquise the obsession. It could not have seemed more dated.
Because that’s not the university you will find at the Boat Race. The shape of the elite is changing – there were no Boris Johnsons in Putney, none of the fading aristo red-chino archetypes. Porterhouse Blue might have been a perceptive satire in the 1970s, and I am sure Brideshead Revisited got a lot right about the 1920s. But if Americans come here looking for the Bullingdon Club and recitations of Homeric verse, they will more likely find a Student Union organised yoga class. Whichever Oxford exists in the imagination of the curious Yank, well – it has been defanged at the altar of welfare seminars and mental health weeks.
It is no loss that Oxford students have forgotten the habit of smashing up restaurants – but any American in search of a little Gideon Osborne or a tyrannical Latin-quoting floppy-haired cad might be disappointed. Cambridge’s answer to the Bullingdon – the Pitt Club – even lets in women, and shares its premises with a Japanese restaurant.
No, the students here have no use for straw boaters or blazers any more – as their identity, along with the rest of the global elite, flattens out; as we approach elite-singularity. We can blame in no particular order the democratic internet, the free market, the free exchange of information, and travel. As people and their cash move about more easily, national distinctions fade and once-defining characteristics blend and mesh. And the banks of the Thames on Boat Race day look more like a breakout room at Davos than a party designed from the imagination of Evelyn Waugh. All of a sudden, everyone is Rishi Sunak and Nick Clegg.
We can commend the students of Oxford and Cambridge down at the race – they know this is the world they are graduating into and they have already started doing a rather convincing impression of McKinsey-speak. These children will take over the country and run it with a pan-European, transatlantic drawl and an enthusiasm for the human resources department. The people who should be most concerned about all of this are rowers – if, today of all days, the rowing is an afterthought, they don’t stand a chance.
[Further reading: Who’s really on show at Crufts, the owners or the dogs?]
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This article appears in the 08 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall
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Subscribe here to commentOne part of English life that hasn’t been flattened, that still hangs on in certain precious venues, is the clever yet humanely gentle satirical eye, expressed in toned and witty prose. Joyce’s Dubliners is the greatest exemplar of this style, but Jerome K Jerome‘s native English variety is also in the background here. And it’s still about Boating! Thank you, Finn, for brightening my Sunday morning.