Joe’s tale of his political ambition and disillusion amid the dreaming spires

JOE Cooke thought he had seen it all in life: his grandfather was of Romany stock; most of his male relatives including his father have spent time in prison and he was raised by a single-parent mother.

He is dyslexic and dyspraxic and mostly struggled through state school. Yet against all the odds he made it to Oxford University, determined to make his future in politics. But while he was there he faced behaviour that left him deeply shocked and led him to rethink his entire future.

The experiences that changed his life plan happened within the confines of the Oxford University Conservative Association, the 88-year-old political club known as a conveyor belt for future Tory MPs.

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Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and William Hague cut their teeth as presidents of OUCA, which is renowned for being as ferocious as Westminster. Cabinet members Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Grieve, Teresa May and Sir George Young are also among its alumni.

But it was not the cut-throat politics which dismayed Joe, who was to become president of OUCA, but the debauchery and snobbery of his political peer group. In fact, he was so traumatised by his experience there that he has rejected British politics and plans to try his luck in the US.

“I don’t expect to go into front line politics in this country any more,” said Joe, 22, who comes from Mirfield, near Huddersfield.

“I don’t want to be an MP. I’m too disillusioned for that now. When I stood for President, I toned down my accent and changed my wardrobe. I’m not willing to sell myself out again to get this hollow crown.

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“I went to Oxford naïve and I came out a realist. Some of my dreams were burnt and some of my ambitions lie in tatters. But I have gained the knowledge of who I am and the steel inside that is invaluable.”

With Joe’s family history, it was surprising to say the least that he got as far as Oxford. His father, Brian, was a convicted drug dealer and his mother Janet spent many yeas as a struggling single parent.

But it was this background and experience of the hard knocks of life that informed his attitude to law and order and made him a die-hard Conservative, says Joe.

“My father worked in the mills,” said Joe. “He was the first man in Mirfield to have an E-Type Jaguar. But he was imprisoned for increasing the weight of wool by wetting it. That was his first dalliance with the law.”

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Brian Cooke was a 37-year-old divorcee with three children – two by his first wife and one by his mistress – when he met Joe’s mother Janet, 16 years his junior.

The couple married in 1980 and had two children, Alex in 1985 and Joe in 1990. But in 1994, when Joe was four years old, his father was convicted of drug and tax offences and sent to prison for eight years. He died in 2007, when Joe was 17.

Joe remembers visiting him in Armley Prison, still finding the memory painful. “We used to visit him weekly. But we stopped going when... my mum decided it wasn’t the life she wanted for her children. He never came back into our lives.

“I support every year he was in prison because I’ve seen the effects of drugs not only on addicts’ lives but on the lives of the people who were doing the dealing.”

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After her husband was jailed, Janet scrimped and saved to bring up her children alone but they could not escape Brian’s criminal associates. “We were targeted weekly,” says Joe. “I remember once they broke all the windows in the house, laid my mum’s underwear out on the bed and tied the dog up in the bathroom.”

The family moved house to a bungalow in Staincross, near Barnsley, but the attacks persisted. ‘”My mum was letting the dog out one day when masked burglars broke in. I was about four years old at the time.

“My sister ran to the neighbours to get help while I stood at the door as they beat mum almost to death with baseball bats.” Had the burglars not been disturbed it’s unlikely Janet would have survived, said doctors. The perpetrators were never found.

“This is where my hatred of crime comes from,” says Joe, whose story is told in a BBC2 documentary tonight. “I hate people who are soft on the culprits. There’s only one way to deal with them. You have to be tough.”

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Deaf in one ear at birth, Joe did not start speaking until he was five years old. He was also diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia at the age of five.

After going to a primary school for children with learning difficulties, Joe moved to Castle Hall comprehensive where he struggled to keep up with his classmates. But he had an epiphany at the age of 14.

“I came bottom in religious education and was the laughing stock,” he recalls. “I came home and said to my mum ‘I will never be the bottom of anything again,’ and I wasn’t.

“I refuse to be pitied or judged by anybody or given a slot in life. I haven’t looked back since. In a single year my grades increased by 40 per cent.”

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It was then that he joined the Conservative Party. ‘My heroes at the time were Churchill and Thatcher,’ he says. “They were the figures I looked up to.”

From that point Joe was single-minded, aiming to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford because “...in my mind that was the course anybody who was involved in politics had taken.”

He achieved 11 A* GCSE’s and four A-grade A-levels, and was in the top five in the country gaining 100 per cent in politics, economics and law.

He still remembers his interview at Oxford. “I didn’t know to be daunted,” he says. “I’d set my mind on it and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me. I didn’t mix with any of the other interviewees because they all seemed a bit haughty.

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“I didn’t want to mix with the opposition. I wasn’t going to be put off psychologically by people trying to psyche me out.”

Joe’s tactics paid off and he went up to Oriel in 2009 – one of only 25 pupils at the university eligible for free school meals. He joined the Conservative club immediately and threw himself into modernising it.

The Conservative Association had been disgraced and become disaffiliated from the university after members told racist jokes during electoral hustings, says Joe.

“Numbers were down to a minimum and the society was in chaos,” he says. “We knew, if there was to be a future for it, it had to be modern – it had to be Cameronite.” Changing things would prove very difficult, though.

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However, he discovered that the Association’s revered Port and Policy evenings, in which they historically debated politics, were evenings of revelry – the annual bill for port ran to £10,000 – and students from a working-class background were ridiculed by a clique of former public schoolboys.

Joe himself was subjected to comments such as “by gum” and “pork pie” whenever he spoke, because of his Yorkshire accent.

“It was probably meant as banter,but when you’ve got an entire room doing that to you it eats away at your confidence. So I changed my accent.”

Despite his reservations, Joe stood for President of Association in his second year and was elected unopposed. He tried to steer the association away from socialising towards politics but found the partying to be too ingrained.

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He finally resigned from the Association – the first president in its 88-year history to do so – along with seven other members, after the Oxford student newspaper revealed the debauched, anti-Semitic and nepotistic behaviour of some of its members.

The investigation, which centred on one particular evening in 2010, started an official inquiry by the university.

“At that time I was enjoying Oxford University in general. It gave me an excellent, world-class education and many amazing opportunities. I don’t regret going there, and would recommend it to anyone who is ambitious.”

“But, looking back, I regret that I changed myself to compete. I didn’t lie but I didn’t tell the truth about who I was. I toned down my accent, my wardrobe became more conservative and I tried to fit the electorate. I regret playing their game.

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“I feel like I betrayed who I am by trying to fit into their warped reality. But I don’t think I would have been elected if they had known my father was in prison, if I had dressed how I wanted to, or spoken how I wanted to speak. (I realised that) in politics you sacrifice your ideals on the high altar of pragmatism.”

Joe flew back from Washington this week after negotiating himself a political internship starting later this year.

“I intend to stay there for the long haul,” he says. “I’ve always had a fascination with America. I love the liberty and the fact that where you come from doesn’t limit what you can achieve.

“What my parents did – the fact my dad was in prison – none 
of that matters over there. It’s 
who you are that counts. I 
learned the hard way, but I shall never forget – if you can’t achieve it as who you are, its not worth fighting for.”

Wonderland: Young, Bright and on the Right is on BBC2 at 9pm tonight.

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