Toby Young

The think tank Policy Exchange has just published an excellent report on Britain’s urban green spaces called ‘Park Land’. The report’s author, Katherine Drayson, argues that we need to take better care of our parks and public gardens, particularly in the north-east, where local authority expenditure on open spaces has been cut by more than a third in the past two years. ‘Flourishing parks and green spaces are central to the success of our cities,’ argues Drayson. ‘Yet we’ve all gone for a walk in our local park only to find used needles, dog excrement and litter ruining our beautiful green spaces.’ Drayson’s solution is for the government to help set up a website that maps all of Britain’s urban green spaces.

I love The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. On the face of it, they’re a great advertisement for just how broadminded and sophisticated the editors of this magazine are. We’re able to rise above the political fray and generously acknowledge MPs on both sides of the House, regardless of which party they belong to. But at the same time, it’s also a way of drawing attention to the fact that we Tories aren’t as parti pris as our lefty opponents. Unlike us, they’re far too bogged down in the petty bickering of daily politics to pay tribute to their enemies. And in this way we’re able to score a few cheap political points. Having said that, I was slightly taken aback when Tristram Hunt won ‘Newcomer of the Year’.

Why is local politics so much dirtier than national politics? Is it because the players are fighting over relatively trivial matters, like Oxbridge dons competing for college posts? As Henry Kissinger said, ‘University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.’ Or is it because local politicians are less likely to be exposed to the disinfectant of publicity? Well, I intend to remedy that. Last week, a Conservative councillor in Hounslow drew my attention to an election leaflet distributed by three prospective Labour councillors that contained the following misrepresentation under the headline ‘Chiswick School loses out to Free School’: ‘Chiswick School was on the list for Hounslow’s Building Schools for the Future money.

Five years ago I joined forces with some local worthies to object to the opening of a strip joint on Acton High Street. We weren’t successful, but the owner of the club decided to invite us all to the opening night. He claimed we’d got the wrong end of the stick. It wasn’t a sleazy lap-dancing club — oh no — but a ‘burlesque’ club. What this meant in practice is that the dancers had glued feathers to their micro bikinis. Apart from that it was business as usual. The upshot was that I spent a couple of hours standing in the middle of a strip club trying to make small talk with about 20 middle-aged ladies, most of them Lib Dem activists, as a succession of topless women gyrated on stage.

The first sign that something was wrong with Ludo was when he complained of a tummy ache. This was after school and hardly a rare occurrence so I didn’t think anything of it. The following morning, he still had a tummy ache. Not a good enough reason to miss school in my opinion, but Caroline thought otherwise. Before I left for a meeting I told him to eat some toast. ‘You’re probably just hungry,’ I said. By lunchtime the pain had become localised on the lower left-hand side of his stomach and Caroline decided to Google his symptoms. It sounded like it could be appendicitis so she took him to the GP and he advised her to take him to paediatric A&E at Chelsea and Westminster.

By the time you read this I’ll be 50. A couple of years ago, when President Obama passed this milestone, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph about how much I was dreading it. But now it’s finally happening, I can’t think what all the fuss was about. Turns out it’s a bit like being mugged: more terrifying in the imagination than reality. It’s possible that I’m in denial. According to a study carried out by Warwick University and Dartmouth College, involving more than two million people, turning 50 is a low point. ‘One in five women and one in six men in this country suffer from depression at this time,’ says Dr Andrew McCulloch, the ex-chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation.

I’m still weighing up whether to run for Parliament, but after this week’s reshuffle I’ve concluded I’m in the wrong party. If you’re a middle-aged white male, particularly one who’s been to Oxford, your chances of becoming a Conservative minister are negligible. Unless you’re a pal of George Osborne’s, obviously, in which case it doesn’t matter if you have B-U-L-L-E-R tattooed on your knuckles, you’ll still get promoted. In the Labour party, by contrast, coming from a privileged background actually seems to help. I’m not just talking about the usual suspects, like Lord Longford’s niece Harriet Harman and ex-public schoolboy Ed Balls. I’m thinking of the new shadow education secretary.

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference in Manchester, but it’s Ed Miliband I want to discuss. In particular, his objection to Saturday’s article in the Daily Mail about his father Ralph. I felt a smidgen of sympathy for Ed when I saw the headline (‘The Man Who Hated Britain’) because a similar piece could be written about my father. May be written about him, in fact, if I pursue a career in politics. Like Ralph Miliband, he was a left-wing intellectual and, while he didn’t renounce parliamentary democracy, he was at one point a member of the Communist party. He left in 1936 after the first of Stalin’s show trials.

I should never have agreed to buy Sasha fish for her tenth birthday. But it seemed like such a modest request. It’s not like you’re going to come home one day to find they’ve escaped or starved to death — like certain rodents I can think of. I was also lulled into a false sense of security by Sasha’s promise that she would look after them herself. I wouldn’t have to lift a finger. It wasn’t until we were in the pet shop that I discovered she had something more exotic in mind than a couple of goldfish. She wanted tropical fish. That meant spending £100 on a 50-litre tank, complete with built-in filter and heating element.

For most people, the question of whether to ban the burka is a purely theoretical one. Not for me. As the chairman of a charitable trust that sits above two schools, it’s something I’m obliged to consider. Usually, the heads of the schools fight tooth and nail to preserve their autonomy, claiming that such and such an issue is an ‘operational’ matter and therefore none of my beeswax. But in this case, they’re happy to kick the decision upstairs. It’s not a matter for me alone, but for the trust’s board of directors, of which I’m only one. And I can’t predict how the board will vote. Nevertheless, I will be arguing for a ban. I should begin by saying I’m not in favour of passing a law to ban the burka outright.

I was at a surprise birthday party for a member of the cabinet last week when a Conservative minister spotted me walking past and grabbed my arm. ‘You must do it,’ he said. ‘Do what?’ ‘Become the Conservative candidate in Hammersmith. If all you manage to do is defeat Andy Slaughter and then spend the rest of your life on the backbenches you’ll still have achieved far more than most of us in politics. He’s ghastly, that man, -ghastly.’ This has been a common reaction to my disclosure in The Spectator that I’m thinking of embarking on a political career. Slaughter may have a majority of 3,549 but he’s far from universally loved.

The Hammersmith Conservative Association will shortly be looking for a candidate to run against the sitting Labour MP in 2015 and I’m thinking of applying. But by God, it’s a tough decision. On the face of it, the case against is pretty overwhelming. The local MP, Andy Slaughter, has a majority of 3,549 and on current projections there will be a swing away from the Tories in London. The Conservatives fielded a strong candidate in 2010 in the form of Shaun Bailey and still couldn’t win it. What hope would I have in 2015 — and that’s assuming I get selected, by no means a foregone conclusion?

An acquaintance of mine called Daisy Christodoulou has just published a book called Seven Myths about Education. It’s a merciless demolition of the received wisdom of the educational establishment, such as the view that there’s no point in asking children to memorise anything, because they can look it up on Google. I’m a huge fan, not least because she combines a conservative attitude towards education with a socially progressive outlook. As I’ve often argued, those two positions are complementary rather than incompatible.

Character is destiny, according to Heraclitus, and that becomes increasingly clear as you get older and chart the ups and downs of your friends. Take the fate of one of my oldest acquaintances, who I’ll call ‘Philip’. Up until his mid-forties, Philip had a pretty spectacular career as a journalist and broadcaster. He won awards, and was invited to speak at international conferences. His personal life was equally successful. He married a beautiful, intelligent woman and had two lovely children. But Philip has a tragic flaw: he’s hopeless with money. In all the time I’ve known him, I don’t think he’s ever paid a tax bill on time.

I’m currently in Cornwall with my family and whenever I spend a lot of time with my children I’m constantly reminded of the opening lines of ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.’ One of the faults my late father passed on to me was an obsession with sports cars. As he cruised along the motorway in his Austin Maxi at a steady 70mph he would point out every fast car that passed us, usually accompanied by a barrage of facts: ‘Ooh look. That’s a Lotus Esprit. I think that’s an S1 — yes, it’s an S1. It has the same four-cylinder engine that was used in the Jensen Healey.

One of the great things about spending the summer holidays in England is that it gives you an opportunity to experience life in the country. All year, Caroline and I dream about moving out of London and spend hours scouring property websites to see what we could buy if we sold our house in Acton. But after a few days in Yorkshire or Suffolk, all our bucolic illusions are shattered. Suddenly, London doesn’t seem so bad after all. We’re currently in Norfolk staying with a friend near Burnham Market — known locally as ‘Burnham Mark-up’ because everything is so overpriced.

Scarcely a day passes, it seems, without another book landing with a thud on my desk that bemoans the rise of inequality. On this side of the Atlantic we have The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Injustice by Daniel Dorling, while in America we have Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality. I’m coming round to the view that these intellectual heavyweights have got it back to front and the really significant social trend of our era is the triumph of equality. So it was refreshing to dip into A Classless Society, the third volume of Alwyn Turner’s history of Britain since the 1970s.