More from life

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Brave, noble, forgotten – the other side of Italy’s second world war

At the time of the armistice of September 1943, when the kingdom of Italy formally transferred its allegiance from the Germans to the invading Allies, there were some 40,000 British prisoners-of-war languishing in camps around the country. Camp gates were thrown open by fleeing Italian guards, but on orders from Whitehall thousands of PoWs stayed put until the Germans arrived and packed them off to other camps in Germany. Some 4,000 of them, however, set off to seek freedom either by heading north towards Switzerland or south towards the advancing Anglo–American forces, which had just arrived on the Italian mainland after their conquest of Sicily.

Robin Oakley

Yes, I’m biased – but this was a great Royal Ascot

The one sight I was determined not to miss at Royal Ascot was that of the Queen from over the water coming to claim the hearts of English racegoers. The commanding way in which Treve won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe last October stamped her as something very special and she should have been worth going a long way to see. But it turned out that the damp turf of Longchamp in the autumn and the quick ground at Ascot in June were not all the same to her. Although sheer quality brought her home in third in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes, the fizz had escaped Treve’s bottle before they left the stalls and Frankie Dettori reported that she ran flat all the way.

Toby Young

Do people really hate free schools – or do they just hate me?

This isn’t a headline I was expecting to read: ‘Free schools could be a bigger negative for the Tories than Ed Miliband is for Labour.’ Given that Miliband’s net satisfaction ratings are minus 39, that was quite a shock. Do the people who disapprove of free schools really outweigh the people who approve of them by a bigger margin than that? Well, no, they don’t, obviously. The headline, which appeared on the blog of Mike Smithson, a left-wing gadfly, was a reference to a YouGov poll on 20 June. Respondents were asked whether they supported or opposed the creation of free schools: 23 per cent were in favour, 53 per cent opposed and 24 per cent undecided. That’s minus 20, not quite in Miliband territory. But not good, definitely not good.

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

On being fired – and hired – as an editor

Last week was unusual. At the start of it, I was mooching about in the country in my customary way, doing little odd jobs and fretting over the fate of my poultry, which is once again under attack from foxes. I have yet to see a fox in Northamptonshire this year, but the farmer says there is a fox’s lair in an old barn in the park below my house. He sits there with his shotgun most evenings at dusk, but he never seems to get a shot at one. I have to admit there’s no evidence that foxes are responsible for the losses among my flock of ducks, but it’s hard to think who else might be. In the past few weeks, ducks have been disappearing one by one, and now there are only nine of them left out of the previous 14.

Toby Young

It’s time to face down the greatest intellectual threat of our era (oh, and Ed Miliband)

As you’re reading this, I will still be recovering from the dinner I’m due to attend this week to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Centre for Policy Studies, the think tank founded by Sir Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher. Earlier the same day, I’m due to appear on a panel with various conservative grandees to discuss whether the other side has won. Classical liberals emerged victorious from the battle of ideas in the 1980s, thanks in part to the work of the CPS, but it’s beginning to look as though we’ll have to have the same arguments all over again. One reason for concern is the hard left turn taken by the Labour party. It has often been said that Thatcher’s greatest victory was converting her socialist opponents to economic liberalism.

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Young Italians flock to London – for just the same reasons it scares me

Although I live in the country in Northamptonshire, I go to London often — almost once a week — and I find it more and more intimidating. This isn’t just because of the skyscrapers that spring up boastfully everywhere, parading one’s own insignificance, but also because of the aura of terrifying wealth that pervades its central area and now even its inner suburbs. Fifty years ago, when I got married, my wife and I bought our first London house in Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, for £9,500. I wonder how many millions it is worth now.

Robin Oakley

Cambridge, meet your first professor of racing lore

Watching the contestants parade at Epsom for this year’s Oaks, I remembered the great D. Wayne Lukas’s pronouncement on selecting fillies: ‘She should have a head like a princess, a butt like a washerwoman and walk like a hooker.’ The John Gosden-trained Taghrooda, listed a month earlier as the first of our Twelve to Follow this season, ticked all those boxes. I doubled my bet and cheered her home nearly four lengths clear of the biggest Oaks field in 40 years. Sheikh Hamdan al Maktoum, an owner who gives much to the sport, has had a lean few years and it was good to see another Classic success for his blue and white colours.

Toby Young

Yes, I compared Theresa May to an Israeli tank commander. Why is everyone so upset?

I expect all of us have said something we regret at one time or another, but not everyone does so in front of 1.5 million people. That was my misfortune when I was caught off guard by an interviewer for ITN on my way out of a television studio in Westminster on Sunday. I’d just done a review of the morning’s papers on Murnaghan and was feeling rather chipper on account of the exchange I’d just had with Diane Abbott about Labour’s electoral chances. Live on air, I offered to bet her £100 that Ed Miliband wouldn’t win the election and, to my delight, she refused to take it. ‘I never bet,’ she said. Not exactly a vote of confidence from someone who, until recently, was a key member of Miliband’s leadership team.

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

I wouldn’t have accepted Lord Rennard’s apology – but then he shouldn’t have made it

Shirley Williams has a point when she says that Lord Rennard’s alleged harassment of four female Lib Dem colleagues was very small beer compared with the sexual abuse attributed to so many other prominent people nowadays. Indeed, when the charges were made public early last year, I was underwhelmed by the account given by one of these women of Lord Rennard’s behaviour towards her during a Lib Dem conference in a Peterborough hotel. His knee had brushed hers on a sofa in the bar; and when she had shifted her knee, his had followed and brushed it again. She had fled to the bathroom, only to find him waiting outside it when she emerged. He had then invited her to his room for a nightcap; but when she declined, that was that: end of story.

Toby Young

I used to think I was a Nietzschean superman. Now I know I’m just a dad

In The Wolf of Wall Street, there’s a poignant shot towards the end in which we see an FBI agent going home on the subway. This law enforcement officer — Agent Patrick Denham — will eventually bring about the downfall of Jordan Belfort, the film’s main character, and the fact that he uses public transport is supposed to be evidence of his integrity. He’s an honest, hard-working tax-payer who plays by the rules. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but in the past 25 years I’ve gone from being an international party boy to a kind of FBI agent. Admittedly, I’ve never plumbed the depths of debauchery that Jordan Belfort does in the film. Even in my New York heyday, I was more of a Mouse of Madison Avenue than a Wolf of Wall Street.

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Sorry, Tara Erraught, but the age of the fat lady singing is over

London’s opera critics have been roundly condemned for suggesting that a female singer’s personal appearance could make her unsuitable for a role. The singer in question is Tara Erraught, a young Irish mezzo-soprano based in Germany, who has just made her British debut in the new Glyndebourne production of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. She takes the part of Octavian, who, although always played by a woman, is supposed in the plot to be an irresistibly attractive young man. The critics all admired Erraught’s voice, but took the view that she was too stocky, dumpy, chubby and unsightly (to use four of their adjectives) to be even remotely plausible as an object of sexual desire. Uproar followed, with other opera singers leaping to her defence.

Robin Oakley

Will racing waste its Scoop6 jackpot?

Eight people became millionaires last Saturday, collecting £1,342,599 each when the Scoop6 bet, which had been rolled over for 12 weeks without a winner, was finally won. With racing’s narrative having been dominated for weeks by the gamble to find six winners on the day, there was more than £16 million in the pot: £11 million had been staked that day alone by punters large and small trying to collect an instant fortune. Let us hope no relationships suffer: I could not help thinking of the lottery winner’s wife who asked, ‘Will you still feel the same about me now you’ve won all that money?’ only to meet the reply, ‘I’ll certainly miss you...

Toby Young

Michael Gove did not kill Of Mice and Men or To Kill A Mockingbird

I suppose I should be grateful that the liberal intelligentsia doesn’t bother to check any of the facts if an opportunity presents itself to attack Michael Gove. They have a fixed idea about him, which is that he’s a Tory philistine who wants to turn the clock back to the 1950s, and they leap on any story that confirms that view, regardless of how far-fetched it is. The reason I’m grateful is because it enables me to scratch out a living putting the record straight. Last November, Polly Toynbee wrote a column in the Guardian claiming that Gove intended to strip English literature from the national curriculum, an act of cultural vandalism she compared to ethnic cleansing. Why had he perpetrated this terrible crime?

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Why do consultants write such scary, incomprehensible letters?

There is a kind of letter designed to bewilder, upset and possibly terrify its recipient, and this is the standard letter sent by specialist medical consultants to the victims of disease. Actually, the letter is usually addressed to the sufferer’s GP, but a copy is always sent to the patient as well; and because of this it usually begins with a flattering personal reference just to soften him up (‘It was a delight to meet this charming old gentleman’, or some such phrase). Thereafter, it may propose some little variation in the person’s treatment, but its main purpose is to describe in lurid and impenetrable detail the symptoms of his disease.

Toby Young

Chasing Pulitzers has ruined American journalists. That’s why they’re edited by Brits

I was interested to read a story by Michael Wolff in USA Today saying that Graydon Carter may be about to step down as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Carter has been at the helm for 22 years and was my boss during the three years I spent there between 1995 and 1998. According to Wolff, himself a columnist at the magazine, the runners and riders to take over are nearly all British. Wolff thinks this is mainly because power within Condé Nast, the publishing company that owns Vanity Fair, has shifted from New York and towards London, home of Condé Nast International, a subsidiary that is now more profitable than the mother ship.

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Why Glyndebourne’s George Christie always cut his own hair

One curious fact about Sir George Christie, who died last week, aged 79, was that he always cut his own hair, a notoriously difficult thing to do. He did it with a three-way mirror and, according to his wife Mary, did it very badly. His reason, apparently, was a reluctance to waste money on a barber. For while George was very well-off (and the epitome of generosity when it came to others), he hated to spend anything on himself. For example, he never took a taxi — he would always travel in London by Tube or bus, even to such an event as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee service in St Paul’s Cathedral — and he had his suits made by the wardrobe department of the Glyndebourne opera company rather than pay a London tailor.

Robin Oakley

My 12 tips for the racing year

In sport, winning is everything. Come second and only your parents and the dog remember. Most readers will have forgotten that a month ago I reported that champion jockey Richard Hughes was hugely impressed by Richard Hannon’s Night of Thunder, calling him ‘a machine’ on the gallops. He expected Night of Thunder to win Newbury’s Greenham Stakes and become favourite for the 2,000 Guineas. Instead, the Greenham was won in devastating style by John Gosden’s Kingman with Night of Thunder well beaten in second. I advised readers to back Kingman for the Guineas and did so myself. But, come the day, when I discovered that Night of Thunder was 40–1, I had a saver on him too. Each way those had to be generous odds.

Toby Young

The publicist who’s doing her best to keep me off TV

I went to a meeting at Penguin earlier this week to discuss ‘publicity opportunities’ for my forthcoming book. Chance would be a fine thing, I thought. It’s essentially a guide to what’s in the new national curriculum, how it’s likely to be taught at primary schools and what parents can do at home to supplement it. Surely, not a single radio or television producer will be interested in that? No, no, no, said the crack publicity team at Penguin. You’re quite wrong. This book’s going to get a ton of media attention. There are two reasons for this, apparently. First, the book is called What Every Parent Needs to Know and no one considering whether to cover it in their programme is going to bother opening the book or finding out what’s inside.

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Would the urine of an eight-year-old protect my chickens?

I was predicting in a recent column that the arrival of spring would be bad news for my poultry, and so it has turned out: two ducks, a fat, waddling Silver Appleyard called Doris and a graceful, elegant little call duck called Marina (the loyal partner of a still-surviving drake called Boris), have disappeared, almost certainly victims of a marauding fox in search of food for its new cubs. For a while I thought that the missing ducks might be sitting on eggs somewhere, but the belated discovery of a pile of feathers put an end to this hope. Now I am waiting gloomily for the fox to strike again, probably this time against my chickens, which can’t even hope to escape to the safety of the garden pond. What, then, can I do to protect them?

Toby Young

I love everything about supporting QPR — except watching them play

I find it hard to pinpoint the exact moment when my support for Queen’s Park Rangers crossed over into full-blown fandom. I’ve lived in Shepherd’s Bush since 1991, and at one stage owned a house that overlooked their stadium. When dinner guests asked me whether I was bothered by the noise, I used to joke that it only got really loud when QPR scored — so, no, it was like living next door to the British Library. I didn’t go to my first match until after my daughter Sasha was born in 2003 and back then Caroline was convinced I’d only developed an interest in the local club to escape her and the baby. Probably some truth in that, but as a strategy for avoiding childcare it backfired.