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Originally published in SAS Inflight Magazine, January 2015

The Riot Club says a lot about Britain’s richest and most privileged people

Most people in Britain view new film The Riot Club as an attack on the boys who became the men that now make up that country’s political elite. However, the film’s writer, Laura Wade, claims that its characters – like those in her play Posh, on which the movie is based – are entirely fictitious.

Whatever the truth is, the ten youngsters who constitute The Riot Club get involved in uncannily similar situations to those enjoyed by members of the real-life Bullingdon Club. What situations exactly? Booking tables at expensive restaurants, getting outrageously drunk and then causing as much damage as possible. And what is the Bullingdon Club? An all-male dining society for select, mostly privately educated, Oxford University students, of which UK Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson were simultaneously members.

‘The biggest thing in the film is the empathy question. Our government has shown a lack of that,’ Wade says, in reference to extensive welfare cuts after 2008’s financial crisis. ‘In the same way, the boys in the film are unable to understand the lives of those who are less wealthy and have had fewer opportunities than them.’ 

However, one member of Cameron’s Conservative Party accused the film of being nothing but ‘revenge’ for cuts to film festival subsidies, and there might be something to that idea of one privileged and exclusive section of society – the film industry – expressing anger with another. The Riot Club stars Sam Claflin (Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games) as a student invited to join the club because his brother was a member. In a case of life imitating art, it also stars Max Irons – the son of actors Jeremy Irons and Sinéad Cusack – and Freddie Fox – child of two well-known British TV actors. In addition, the movie’s producer, Peter Czernin, went to school with Cameron – at Eton, where annual fees are about £35,000 ($55,000) – later shared a flat with him and donated £5,000 to his campaign to become Conservative Party leader.

This might explain why Irons – himself privately educated – says the film is ‘not attacking people who go to private schools or Oxford University, but a particular set of values’. He also says Czernin texted Cameron telling him to watch the film, and that the Prime Minister replied saying he will. Who knows what his reaction might be