Toby Young

After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself. I very nearly didn’t come back. The first kibbutz I went to was on the Israeli-Lebanese border and about a week after I arrived it was targeted by a group of Palestinian rebels. Katyusha rockets rained down from all sides and the other guest workers and I were ushered into a special air-raid shelter reserved for ‘volunteers’. It was a particularly dank and mouldy affair, with no mod cons save for an ancient, battery-operated radio.

I appeared on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago to discuss the age-old question of whether political satire is dead. I don’t think it is, but it has lost a good deal of vitality in recent years and the role of satire in the general election campaign is a case in point. There has been no shortage of ‘satirical’ television programmes, but none of them have cut through. The only sign of life has been the flurry of photoshopped images on Twitter that have followed each misstep of the parties’ campaigns, such as Ed Miliband’s decision to carve Labour’s election pledges on to an eight-foot stone slab. If Stanley Kubrick was still alive he’d be suing people for illegally reproducing images from the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A couple of weeks ago I returned to my old Oxford college for a ‘gaudy’ — posh, Oxford-speak for a reunion. This one was for those of us who came up to Brasenose in 1983, 1984 and 1985. That group includes the Prime Minister but, not surprisingly, he wasn’t there. I imagine he didn’t want to risk being photographed at a black-tie dinner with a bunch of his Oxford pals in the middle of a general election campaign — or maybe he just finds these occasions a bit of a bore. When I attended my first gaudy about 15 years ago, I assumed that the only people who’d bother to turn up would be those who’d made a success of their lives and they’d spend the entire time bragging about it. In fact, it was much more random than that.

Not a day passes when I don’t look on my father’s record with shock and awe. I’m not talking about his authorship of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, his invention of the word ‘meritocracy’ or his creation of the Open University. I’m talking about the fact that he fathered a child at the age of 80. How on earth did he cope? My eldest was born when I was 40, with three more following in quick succession, and I already think of myself as an old dad. The problem is, they want to play with me all the time — rough, competitive, physical games — and it’s completely debilitating. The boys, aged six, seven and ten, are particularly demanding. I’m just not up to it. God knows how my father managed to stay alive until he was 86.

I’m disappointed that Ed Balls’s suggestion that the Office of Budget Responsibility should audit the parties’ manifestos was never taken up, not least because we will never know what Robert Chote thinks of the Green party’s claim that all its proposals are ‘fully costed’. Believe it or not, this includes the commitment to spend £45 billion on loft insulation in the next parliament. It’s quite something, the Greens’ manifesto. No doubt you’ll have already read about some of their more reasonable measures — such as the ‘complete ban on cages for hens and rabbits’ and the insistence that ‘UK taxpayers’ money is not used for bullfighting’.

I’ve been trying to think of a good football analogy to describe the battle between the two main parties as the general election approaches. One suggestion is the second leg of a Champions League game, with the Conservatives having won the first leg by one goal to nil. If we assume that the Tories are playing at home, that means Labour have to score two goals to win, whereas all the Tories have to do is not concede. Last week’s debate certainly felt like that, with Cameron playing a tight, defensive game and Miliband trying to score at every opportunity. The Conservative leader ended up winning on aggregate because the Labour leader failed to find the back of the net. But a Champions League match suggests two teams of real quality, which is where the analogy breaks down.

As a Tory, I’ve been thinking a lot about inequality recently. Has it really increased in the past five years? Or is that just scaremongering on the part of the left? By most measures, there’s not much evidence that the United Kingdom became more unequal in the last parliament. Take the UK’s ‘Gini co-efficient’, which measures income inequality. In 2009/10, it was higher than it was at any point during the subsequent three years. Indeed, in 2011/12 it fell to its lowest level since 1986. Data isn’t available for the last two years, but there’s no reason to think it has exceeded what it was when Labour left office.

A strange ritual takes place on Twitter most evenings at around 10.30 p.m. Hundreds of political anoraks start tweeting the results of the YouGov daily tracker poll due to be published in the following day’s Sun. Some of them are neutrals, but the majority are politically aligned and will only tweet those results that show their party in front. I often wonder what the point of this is, even though I’m guilty of it myself. It’s not as if anyone is going to see the tweet and say, ‘Ooh, I wasn’t going to vote Conservative, but now that YouGov has them two points ahead I’ve changed my mind.’ I can think of only two sensible reasons for doing this, both quite weak. The first is it has a mildly demoralising effect on your opponents.

Civitas has just published an interesting book called The Ins and Outs of Selective Secondary Schools. Edited by Anastasia de Waal, it’s a collection of essays by the usual suspects in the never-ending argument about grammar schools. De Waal points out that the two sides have more in common than you’d think. In particular, they share a common goal, which is to sever the link between a child’s socio-economic status and attainment. In 2009, according to the OECD, the variance in the scores of British children in the Pisa international tests in maths, reading and science that could be explained by their backgrounds was 13.8 per cent. By this measure, the best-performing region in the world is Macau (2 per cent) and the worst is Peru (27.5 per cent).

My son Charlie was scouted by QPR last week. I say ‘scouted’, but that’s not quite accurate since he’s only six. Rather, a man claiming to be a member of the club’s coaching staff suggested I bring him along to the QPR pre-academy in Willesden. At first, I was suspicious. The man in question teaches football at the local leisure centre and I was worried that this ‘pre-academy’ would turn out to be an expensive, fee-paying affair with no official links to QPR. When the man first introduced the idea, I had to ask if he’d got the right boy. Charlie’s quite small for his age and not exactly lion-hearted.

I was invited on Question Time this week, which gave me a few sleepless nights. Natalie Bennett’s disastrous interview on LBC was a reminder that appearing on a current affairs programme in this febrile pre-election environment can be a bit of a minefield. Admittedly, I’m not the leader of a political party but that’s no guarantee I won’t make a fool of myself — a moment that will be preserved for ever on YouTube. There are no opportunities for glory on Question Time, but plenty for embarrassment. The most you can hope for is to get through the experience in one piece. By now you may well have seen what happened — but I am writing this on Tuesday evening, full of nerves. My biggest fear is that someone might ask a ‘funny’ question.

Last year, I had an exchange with Hugo Rifkind on Twitter in which I bet him dinner at Clarke’s that his father would stand down before the next election. My reasoning was that, at the age of 68, his dad wouldn’t want to serve another five years in the Commons and would be happier in the Lords. I hadn’t anticipated he would depart as a result of a cash-for-access scandal. I’ve always rather fancied running in Kensington myself. Rifkind has a majority of 8,616, which makes it a safe seat, and it’s only a 15-minute cycle ride from my house. But I’m not going to throw my hat into the ring because I still have numerous responsibilities in connection with the three schools I’ve helped set up.

On the face of it, the moral case against tax avoidance seems pretty straightforward. If you’re a UK taxpayer and benefit from public goods and services, then you should pay your fair share of tax. If you’re paying less than that, then you’re a free rider. You’re breaking the social contract. But what do we mean by ‘fair share’? The standard defence of tax avoidance is that it’s perfectly legal — if it wasn’t, it would be tax evasion — and the social contract only obliges people to obey the law, not to pay more tax than they have to. To maintain that people are morally obliged to pay an additional amount of tax, over and above what they’re legally required to pay, is a tricky position to defend.

I suppose we should be thankful that Nicola Sturgeon has acknowledged there’s a problem with Scotland’s public education system, even if she’s hit upon the wrong solution. Earlier this week, the First Minister announced that the Scottish -government would be trying out its version of ‘the London challenge’, a programme carried out by the last government, to address the chronic underachievement of Scotland’s most deprived children. In the past, the SNP has deflected criticisms of its education record by pointing out that Scottish 15-year-olds did marginally better than their English counterparts in the 2012 Pisa tests. But the difference between the two groups is minuscule and both have declined dramatically since Pisa first started testing in 2000.

I can’t say I’m surprised by the departure of Harry Redknapp. Since I started supporting Queens Park Rangers in 2008 we’ve gone through seven managers — 13 if you count the caretakers. Indeed, it’s a miracle he’s lasted this long. The club was relegated during his first term in charge and we only returned to the Premier League thanks to a last-minute goal by Bobby Zamora in the play-off final against Derby at the end of last season. I was at that match and Derby were easily the better side. If Harry had been sensible, he would have announced his retirement after that game and gone out on a high. But what Enoch Powell said of politicians is also true of football managers: their careers always end in failure.

For a brief moment earlier this week, I thought education might become an issue in the general election campaign. The Commons Education Select Committee’s lukewarm report on the government’s academy and free school programmes was leaked to the Guardian on Monday and the accompanying story claimed that Labour hoped to open a ‘second front’ following the ‘success’ of its attacks over the NHS. ‘It is undeniable that the last Labour government dramatically improved school standards in secondary education,’ said Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary. ‘But the progress that we made… is being undone by a government that is obsessed with market ideology in education.