Iain Dale is affable and easy to talk to. He seems to have the ability, which every good radio talk show host needs, of appearing knowledgeable about any subject. Dale made his name with the blog Iain Dale’s Diary, started in 2002. As a political commentator he has written for almost every publication you can imagine, including The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Spectator and The New Statesman — not to mention founding the magazine Total Politics. Now, amongst other things, he presents Drive on LBC 97.3 radio, which involves him broadcasting every weekday for four hours.

Having spent so much time writing and talking about Westminster, I begin by asking him his view on our current set of politicians. “I think my view has changed since I’ve become a radio broadcaster because although I can be opinionated in what I do, I’ve started to see politics how other people see politics. Certainly, when I listen to what a load of my listeners say, they think that all politicians are the same.”

It quickly becomes clear Dale sees this as a pressing issue and is particularly concerned by the increasing lack of real life experience in Parliament. “For whatever reason the parties keep picking apparatchik candidates and then promoting them very quickly through the ranks to become ministers and shadow ministers. Now, that’s easily solvable in some ways, but none of the parties actually show any inclination of wanting to solve it.” Instead, what he insists Parliament needs is people with a record of achievement.

Dale is intimately aware of these problems, having tried running for Parliament himself. He unsuccessfully contested the seat of Norfolk North for the Conservatives, at the 2005 general election. Interestingly, Dale was the first Conservative Candidate to have told the selection committee he was gay before he was selected. Reflecting on this, Dale says, “I remember after I got selected, in the autumn of 2003. I was at the Conservative conference and this young guy came up to me, it turned out he was from Oxford actually, and he said, ‘I want to thank you’ and I looked at him rather quizzically and said, ‘Well, why? I don’t know you.’ And he said, ‘What you’ve just done has made it easier for the rest of us.’ I thought, well, if I don’t actually achieve anything in politics in my life, I can think that this is something I did do, which probably paved the way for other people.” In 2010, however, Dale decided to resign from the Conservative Party candidates list and not to stand in any future elections.

Dale is an outsider to the Oxbridge elite in a profession dominated by it. He obtained a degree in German, Linguistics, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language from the University of East Anglia in 1985. When I ask whether he ever wanted to go to Oxford, his answer is a swift “no”. He says that part of the reason was he felt he would be out of place at the time.

Talking about his interaction with graduates of Oxford, he says, “People who have been to Oxford or Cambridge have a certain confidence about them — a certain element. It’s indefinable — you can almost always tell when someone’s been to Oxford or Cambridge.”

He recounts attending an interview for a job to work at the BBC’s translation unit in Caversham. “I thought I’d done absolutely fantastically and I got turned down. There may have been other reasons, but it seemed to me then I didn’t have the right background to be there. I still think it’s a little bit the same now at organisations like the BBC. If you’ve been to Oxford or Cambridge you still have an advantage over everyone else.”

Despite these setbacks Dale has ended up having a successful career as a political commentator. His interview style is quite different from many others in the media. He manages to ask pertinent questions without being aggressive and, even more unusually, allows politicians to develop their ideas at length. “I don’t believe that by shouting at politicians, that you get any answers out of them. Jeremy Paxman is a fantastic journalist, but he is only sometimes a great interviewer. There are too many interviewers who go into interviews with the intention of having a row. I can honestly say, I don’t think I’ve ever done. I believe if you treat an interview at least in part as a conversation, you’re more likely to get something out of them.” This is an approach, which has so far proved quite successful for Dale, although he concedes that he does think he should press politicians more.

For a man whose life has been so dominated by Westminster, Dale’s interests are moving beyond politics. His show focuses on many topics other than parliamentary politics, with callers phoning in to talk about issues from mental health to male attitudes to rape. He explains his shift in style since he started working at LBC in 2010. “I thought all I’d be doing was politics, but now I find I actually really enjoy these sort of emotional phone-ins. If you had told me that three years ago, I would have laughed. It wasn’t something I knew anything about, it wasn’t even something I was interested in.” Nevertheless, he notes that the shift has been successful. “Now we’ve been nominated for awards for what we do. So I often get more enjoyment out of that than I do the politics.”

It isn’t about the drinking, you know; lord knows we’re all entitled to drink what we like. It isn’t about societies, either, and it isn’t even that drinking societies are bad, in themselves. I was in one myself, and it was daft and fun and harmless.

The problem, really, comes when they’re not harmless, when some bright spark floats the notion of spiking women’s drinks on a crew date, or when Conservative society decides dressing its women up as animals for a “fox hunt” social.

I just can’t help but feel that anger with the press for shining a light on, say, rugby players dressed as savages for an off-colour bop, or white folks in blackface in general, or people dressed as the exploding Twin Towers, for fuck’s sake, is particularly well placed. Blacking up, it should not need to be said, is not banterous, it’s a hurtful, overtly racist means of belittling a whole group of people for the colour of their skin. Describing women as “FREE PUSSY” and seeing them as nothing more than quarry to be hunted is equally unacceptable, and when this stuff happens, you can be damn sure it counts as news.

To be clear, I do not report on every last speck of ill behaviour I hear about; “shitfaced lax team projectile vomits across curryhouse toilet” is not news. You are vastly welcome, as far as I’m concerned, to get as battered as you like and indulge in as much naked windmilling as you physically can without the thing falling off, and you’ll never see me publish so much as a frowny-faced emoticon on the matter. But if you’ve gotten arseholed and disrupted A&E en masse in Cambridge, people are going to want to hear about it.

I admit that Oxford does get more than its fair share of press. I’ll tell you why: you are the elite, socially and academically, and people care about you and your misdemeanours. Why do you think the boat race has a viewership in the tens of millions? I guarantee it is not because Britain at large harbours a secret love of rowing. So if you misbehave on an egregious level – which of course practically none of you ever do – it will be read about.

There’s this feeling that Oxbridge somehow gets a negative rap in a media totally stuffed with alumni. If anything, I would contend that it gets a positive ride verging on the hagiographic, and that truly negative articles are noteworthy entirely by their rarity.

But it isn’t just you guys up to no good. There are drinking societies acting the twat up and down the land, from Stirling to Aberystwyth. Hell, when the Cambridge Wyverns were told they could no longer invite (intelligent, autonomous) women to jelly-wrestle in their pants, they invited them instead to ride a big pink bucking penis.

On a personal level I always found the whiff of class that pervaded most Oxford drinking societies to be more obnoxious, with their black ties and their black-balling. But my distaste for the likes of Grid and Piers Gav is better understood through a prism of economics, and the way Oxford’s posh boy boozing jamborees illustrate Oxford’s posh boy problem in general. That, though, isn’t news.

Unless you’ve spent most of your undergraduate life so far in a state of eremitism, someone will have presented you with an account of an all-male Oxford drinking society sexually objectifying, or even preying upon, a group of women. Drawing up fit lists; assuming guests to their events will end up ‘in bed with’ them; inviting female students to be ‘hunted’. That behaviour so belittling, entitled, and sometimes sinisterly predatory has not been suffered gladly and has in the last few years brought under fire such societies as the Black Cygnets of St Hugh’s, the Syndicate at Teddy Hall, and Hertford’s Penguin Club bodes well for Oxford’s development towards a less intimidating social landscape. What bodes less well, however, is that the criticism levelled at these institutions and others of their ilk is largely limited in scope to their treatment of women, occasionally extending to their proclivity to smash up restaurants, leave trails of glass in their wake, and decorate second quads with vomit. Of course, with their readily identifiable victims and their palpable consequences, these are the transgressions of Oxford’s drinking societies which make the easiest, and in some ways the most urgent, matters of discussion. However, if we are committed to confronting the quietly pervasive feelings of inadequacy and isolation that haunt so many of the university’s less privileged students as well as dealing with the ubiquitous spectre of misogyny, the discussion can’t end there. We have to address a number of other problems with Oxford’s drinking society culture.

Foremost amongst these is the way that drinking societies promote, by the very fact of their existence, the idea that some people’s company is so undesirable that barriers must be erected in order to ward it off and an association with them so objectionable that it must be denied. I know that sounds like a very ungenerous interpretation of drinking society culture and I don’t believe that many (if any) of its participants consciously set out to deliver to other students the message that they are ‘undesirables’ but considering the facts for a moment, I think it is clear that it is something they absolutely do. Now, there are some contexts in which our social interaction with others must be in some way circumscribed and formalised. A football competition is one such context. A boozy meal or night in Bridge is not. The nature of your activity is not emptied of its meaning if one or two more people decide to join you, as would be the case if two more players took to one side of the football pitch. The activity you are engaged in does not depend on all participants remaining recognisable as members of a named social constellation, as is the case in a football tournament. Alcohol-fuelled inter-year or inter-collegiate bonding is not enabled only by the formalisation of a social grouping and the close controlling of its boundaries. Thus where such formalisation has occurred, it is difficult to understand what the motivation behind it could be if not a deep disinclination to mix with, or even to be categorised alongside, anyone outside the select coterie in question. Even in the many cases where those who are excluded have no real desire to mix with the members of the self-proclaimed society, these clear, public signs that they would not be welcome to do so can still prove hurtful.

But it is not only over this essential fault that most of our drinking societies should be challenged: a high proportion of Oxford’ effective private members’ clubs must be called out for their gleeful flaunting of privilege. What makes that longstanding rumour about Bullingdon boys burning fifties in front of the homeless so believable is the fact that they, alongside members of most of the city’s other drinking clubs, can be seen burning their money on so many other occasions. Sometimes through excessive consumption (apparently the raison d’être of the Piers Gaveston society), sometimes through wanton destruction. Always in very bad taste. Because while it is easy to see, when you think about it rationally, that it is the individuals who put on these displays of luxury who are further out of step with most of Oxford, that does not stop those of us from working class backgrounds feeling, when another tale of their excesses hits the rumour mill, that old fear that Oxford is a place for the rich: a playground of privilege in which we are quite alone. And the fear is coupled with an increasingly strong sense of dissatisfaction with your own lot. Both this dissatisfaction and the sense of not belonging are reinforced, of course, by the way that a number of drinking societies not only flaunt them but treat those inherited comforts of wealth and social prominence as the ultimate indices of a person’s worth, indulging in a practice (unprovable but very real) of shortlisting candidates for each new intake based primarily, if not exclusively, on the schools they went to and the people they holiday with. Such a modus operandi, when it is observed in action enough times, goes a step further than making working-class students aware of their relative position on a socio-economic spectrum: it leaves them embarrassed by it. If you are shown repeatedly that only being rich and well-connected makes you socially desirable, eventually you start to believe it. Because their ways reinforce, and sometimes even inculcate, this sense of embarrassment, alongside feelings of dissatisfaction, isolation and rejection, Oxford’s drinking societies – even when they seem to be on their best behaviour – represent a dark blot on the university’s social landscape.