Toby Young

The older I get, the more Scrooge-like I become. I’m dyspeptic, misanthropic, curmudgeonly, parsimonious and unsentimental. Caroline, by contrast, is even-tempered, sweet-natured, charitable, generous and easily moved. Yet paradoxically, I love Christmas, whereas she regards it as a time of year to be endured rather than enjoyed. This inevitably leads to a number of arguments and, as with everything else connected with the festival, they’ve become ritualised. So here are the rows that are guaranteed to occur in the Young household at this time of year. The season always begins with a heated discussion about external lighting. My ideal is to go Full Chav, with a giant neon-lit Santa plastered over the front of the house, along with sleigh, reindeer, elves… the lot.

Last week I put £25 on Lady C to win I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. At 25/1, I thought it was quite a good bet – until she withdrew for medical reasons. For those not watching the 15th series of the jungle reality show, Lady C is Lady Colin Campbell, a self-proclaimed ‘socialite’ and author of several royal biographies. Some of her fellow contestants, such as ex-Spandau Ballet frontman Tony Hadley, have accused her of not being a ‘real lady’, but they don’t have a clue, obviously. They mean she swears a lot, which hardly disqualifies her from being a toff.

I wonder if Steven Spielberg is having second thoughts about Bridge of Spies in light of the attack on Paris? Spielberg’s latest film —released this week and tipped for Oscar glory — is an espionage thriller set at the height of the Cold War with no immediate relevance to the ‘war’ we find ourselves in today. But it contains a strong liberal message about the importance of observing due process when dealing with enemy combatants and prisoners of war. The hero of Bridge of Spies is James Donovan (Tom Hanks), a straight-arrow insurance lawyer who is asked by the American government to defend Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a Brooklyn-based artist who’s been caught spying for the Soviets.

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/parisattacksaftermath/media.mp3" title="Toby Young and Kemi Badenoch discuss the role of integration in the rise of Isis" startat=1470] Listen [/audioplayer]As a graduate student in the Harvard Department of Government in the late 1980s, I became slightly jaded about the number of visiting academics who warned about the imminent demise of the West. The thrust of their arguments was nearly always the same. The secular liberal values we cherish, such as the separation of church and state and freedom of speech, won’t survive in the face of growing religious animosity unless they’re rooted in something more intellectually and spiritually compelling than capitalist individualism.

I’m pleased to announce an addition to the Young household — a ten-week-old Vizsla. For those unfamiliar with this particular breed of dog, they are Hungarian in origin and when fully grown are about the same size as a lab. They make good bird dogs — they’re excellent retrievers — but can also double up as household pets. We’ve named him Leo on account of his leonine colouring. Caroline says it’s like having a new baby, save for the fact that she isn’t breastfeeding him, and that’s not a joke. For one thing, I had no choice in the matter, just as I wasn’t consulted on the four occasions she decided to get pregnant.

I’ve been doing some thinking recently about the findings of behavioural geneticists and their implications for education policy. For instance, a study of more than 10,000 twins found that GCSE results are nearly 60 per cent heritable. (This research, by Robert Plomin, was first revealed in The Spectator.) So genetic differences between children account for almost 60 per cent of the variation in their GCSE results, with the environment, such as the schools they go to, accounting for less than 40 per cent. One very obvious implication of this research is that we may need to lower our expectations when it comes to the impact schools can make on the underlying rate of social mobility. But behavioural geneticists are upending our assumptions in other areas, too. Parenting, for example.

I’m getting a lot of abuse on Twitter for saying that having been a member of the Bullingdon is more of a hindrance than a help in contemporary Britain. My comment was a response to a piece by Charlotte Proudman in the Guardian on Monday that Oxford and Cambridge’s drinking clubs ‘cement the succession of power and influence in Britain among a narrow elite’. In response to my claim, numerous people have pointed out that the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Mayor of London were all members of the Bullingdon. The problem with this rebuttal is that merely pointing out that Cameron, Osborne and Johnson are successful politicians doesn’t, by itself, prove their membership wasn’t a hindrance.

At the last minute, a friend invited me to a ‘Distinguished Speakers Dinner’ at the Oxford and Cambridge Club earlier this week. The dinner was being hosted by Christ’s College and the speaker was Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries and one of the college’s alumni. His subject was ‘The arts in education: luxury or necessity?’, which is why my friend thought I might be interested. Indeed I was. There’s an awful lot of bunkum talked about the arts in education and I’m afraid Sir Nicholas’s speech was no exception.

I can’t say that I’m surprised Playboy has decided to stop publishing pictures of naked women. On the contrary, I was amazed to learn that it still does. What on earth is the point of a nudie magazine in an era when pornography of every conceivable kind is available at the click of a mouse? Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s 89-year-old founder, has always strongly objected to the word ‘porno-graphy’ — he prefers ‘erotica’, obviously — and, to be fair, he did manage to position Playboy as more upmarket than rivals such as Penthouse and Hustler. In its heyday, it included interviews with the likes of Martin Luther King and Jimmy Carter and could afford to pay proper writers such as Norman Mailer and Martin Amis to contribute.

The mood at the Conservative party conference this week was a little subdued, and no wonder. As those who watched the television coverage will know, everyone entering the secure zone had to run a gauntlet of potty-mouthed protestors, their faces twisted into masks of hate. It’s not easy to celebrate after you’ve just been showered with spit and called a ‘Tory murderer’. Jeremy Corbyn made a point in his conference speech last week of asking his supporters to treat their opponents with respect and not descend to personal abuse, but I’m not sure how many of them got the message.

Last week I went to a screening of Steve Jobs, the new biopic about the co-founder of Apple directed by Danny Boyle, and I was impressed. It’s structured like a three-act play, with each act set backstage at the launch of a new product — in 1984, 1988 and 1998 — and then unfolding in real time. Superficially, the film is about the gradual ascent of Apple (and Steve Jobs) as the dominant force in the personal computer industry, but beneath the surface it’s about much more than that. As portrayed by Michael Fassbender, Jobs isn’t just a common or garden perfectionist. He’s neurotic, obsessive, driven, ruthless and almost inhumanly oblivious to the needs of others, including his own daughter.

Amid all the excitement about David Cameron this week, I fear that Jeremy Corbyn’s first major policy announcement may have been overlooked. That would be a shamae because the policy is really, really bad. I’m talking about his proposal to ‘renationalise’ the railways. Now, I have to confess to not really understanding this policy. Aren’t the railways in England, Scotland and Wales already owned by the state in the form of Network Rail? I know the Department for Transport lets franchises to private providers, such as FirstGroup and Virgin Group, but that doesn’t mean these private companies own the railways — the clue is in the word ‘let’.

It’s no good. I’ve tried to resist it, but I’ve succumbed. I’m now a full-blown litter Nazi. Whenever I leave my house, I make a point of taking a plastic bag with me so I can pick up litter. This is in Acton, mind you, so we’re talking a full-size bin liner, not your common-or-garden Sainsbury’s job. Everything goes in the bag. Not just beer cans and cigarette packets — I’m talking about mucky stuff like wet newspapers, polystyrene takeaway containers and banana skins. I even pick up those little black plastic bags full of excrement that some dog owners carefully place beside trees or hang on railings. My children are mortified by this behaviour.

I’ve just written an essay for Quadrant, an Australian periodical, in which I propose a controversial solution to the problem of entrenched inequality: free designer babies for the poor. Yes, yes, I know. It sounds like a 21st-century version of Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ and, at first, I rejected it as being too far-fetched. But the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. So how did I get there? The essay starts by discussing one of the long-term problems with meritocracy, which is that it ends up replacing one hereditary elite with another. This shortcoming was first pointed out by my father, who invented the word ‘meritocracy’ in the 1950s to describe the sort of society he thought Britain was becoming.