The Bullingdon Club is an all-male dining club associated with Oxford University and known for its posh, super-rich members and their notoriously bad behaviour, including trashing restaurants and student rooms.

Former high-flying members include PM Boris Johnson, former PM David Cameron and former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.

A photograph of the Class of '87, featuring Boris Johnson and David Cameron became such an embarrassment to David Cameron that the copyright holders withdrew permission to republish it.

Oxford Mail:

In 2019 the photo was recreated by homeless people for an exhibition at Old Fire Station in Oxford. (The Bullingdon Club with Demelza, Gavin, Jodie, Ann, Anthony, Howie, Mark, Doug, Ryszard and Rowan. Picture: Rory Carnegie)

Oxford artist Rona also created an oil painting of the withdrawn photograph.

Membership is expensive, with tailor-made tailcoat uniforms costing £3,500, according to The Independent, regular gourmet dinners, and a tradition of on-the-spot payment for damage.

In 2004 the BBC reported that a group of students smashed 17 bottles of wine, every piece of crockery and a window at the 15th Century White Hart pub in Fyfield, near Oxford.

Landlord Ian Rogers said the ringleader claimed to be from the Bullingdon Club.

Four of the group were arrested and fined £80.

Mr Rogers, 42, said of the incident: "It was very peculiar. They were not rude or violent to my staff.

"Even when I pulled them off each other when they were fighting and chucking bottles at the walls, they would say 'Sorry old chap, just a bit of high spirits'."

In a 2013 documentary Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, Mr Johnson confessed that he looked back on his Bullingdon days with a sense of “self-loathing” - despite keeping up the tradition of still greeting members with a cry of “Buller Buller Buller”.

“This is a truly shameful vignette of almost superhuman undergraduate arrogance, toffishness and twittishness,” Mr Johnson said when reminded of his exploits as part of the documentary.

“But at the time you felt it was wonderful to be going round swanking it up. Or was it? Actually I remember the dinners being incredibly drunken.”

Referring to one dinner, in which a restaurant was smashed up, he added: “The abiding memory is of deep, deep self-loathing.”

In 2013, the Daily Mirror reported an unsubstantiated claim that the Bullingdon Club’s initiation ceremony required members to “burn a £50 note in front of a beggar”, which it said a friend of one of the club’s elite members had revealed to an Oxford student newspaper.

The same year, BBC broadcaster David Dimbleby told The Telegraph he was proud to wear the uniform of the Bullingdon Club and it was “nothing to be ashamed of”.

The Bullingdon was originally a sporting club, dedicated to cricket and horse-racing, although club dinners gradually became its principal activity.

It is regularly featured in fiction and drama, sometimes under its own name, and sometimes thinly veiled as in Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall and 2014 film The Riot Club.

In 2018, Bullingdon Club members were banned from holding positions in the Oxford University Conservative Association. The association’s president, Ben Etty, said the club’s “values and activities had no place in the modern Conservative party”.

Today it is under threat of extinction as undergraduates shun the club and its toxic reputation.

An Oxford University spokesperson said: “The Bullingdon Club has never been an official student society and the University has always regarded it as completely unacceptable.

“Even in the past, the club was irrelevant to normal student life at Oxford and the vast majority of today’s students will never even encounter it.”