Toby Young

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.

Seeing the royal hack pack in full cry on Monday reminded me of the week I spent with the late James Whitaker, the Daily Mirror’s chief royal correspondent. This was for a profile I was writing about him in a colour supplement in 1993. It was a memorable experience, not least because of the message he left on my answering machine the day the piece came out. ‘I know I said I didn’t care what you wrote, but you could have at least got your fucking facts right,’ he said. He then started listing the facts I’d got wrong: ‘Number one, the Princess of Wales did not call me “the big fat tomato”. It was “the big red tomato”. Number two…’ He was still going strong by the time the tape ran out.

‘Another opening, another show,’ sang five-year-old Charlie on his way to school this morning — and then proceeded to belt out the entire first verse of the famous Cole Porter song. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. All four of my children are deep into rehearsals of Kiss Me Kate, this year’s ‘summer production’ at their primary school, and they’re taking it very seriously. Even more seriously than last year, if that’s possible, when they did Oklahoma! I say Oklahoma! and Kiss Me Kate, but in fact they’re bowdlerised versions, rewritten by the headmaster.

A few years ago, I got the shock of my life when a girl I was sitting next to at a 21st birthday party asked me if I was a dad. ‘Are you asking if I have children?’ I said. ‘No, I’m asking if you’re the father of one of the guests.’ I almost fell off my chair. Until that moment, I had no idea that young people see me as middle-aged. I was 45 at the time so it shouldn’t have come as a shock, but I like to think I’ve inherited my father’s youthful appearance. Indeed, until that moment I was still pitching travel editors with the ‘amusing’ idea of going on an 18-30 holiday and trying to pass as 29.

Caroline and I were watching The Fall in our front room when the intruder entered our house. Not great timing on his part, considering The Fall is a BBC drama series about a serial killer who breaks into people’s homes, then tortures and murders them. Thankfully, we never actually set eyes on him. We only discovered we’d been burgled when we returned to the kitchen to load the dishwasher and found various items missing. But still. Caroline was probably more upset than she would have been if we’d been watching Eat, Pray, Love — which we wouldn’t have been, obviously, because it’s complete drek. I was up most of the night trying to catch the bugger.

An American journalist called David Carr wrote an amusing piece for the New York Times earlier this week about the latest British invasion. To hear him tell it, we’ve captured the commanding heights of the US media, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News and, of course, the New York Times itself, which is run by former BBC director-general Mark Thompson. The latest citadel to fall is The Daily Show, with a Brummie comedian having temporarily taken over presenting duties from Jon Stewart. The article produced mixed feelings in me because I spent the years 1995–2000 trying to ‘take’ Manhattan, all to no avail. For me, America wasn’t the land of opportunity. It was the land of the unreturned phone call.

I made my first skateboard at the age of 12 by pulling apart a roller skate and nailing each half to a plank of wood. Less than half an hour later, my mother was taking me to the family GP to have my little toe stitched up. She decided to buy me a proper one after that. Thus began one of the happiest periods of my life. Skateboarding was more than just a hobby. It was a source of identity. I’m sure that’s as true today as it was back then, but in 1976 it had the added cachet of being virtually unknown outside a tiny circle of devotees. It’s not an exaggeration to say I knew pretty much all of them. We felt that odd mixture of superiority and fraternity that comes from being early adopters of a new subculture.

When did it become a tradition to organise expensive birthday treats for your children? I don’t want to sound like a character in Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, but when I was a boy the most I could hope for on my birthday was a quick game of football with my dad in Highgate Woods. It would have been completely unthinkable for my parents to actually organise a party for me, complete with an entertainer. Nowadays, any celebration that costs less than £200 is considered child cruelty. And before anyone tells me to ‘check my privilege’, I don’t think this phenomenon is confined to the well off. On the contrary, my guess is that the further you travel down the social scale, the more lavish the children’s birthday parties are.

One of the many things I’m grateful to my father for is inventing the word ‘meritocracy’. He coined it in 1958 to describe a society in which social status is determined by ‘merit’, which he defined as a combination of intelligence and effort. As a member of the Labour party, he thought that such a society was thoroughly undesirable because it was every bit as hierarchical as a feudal society, but in some ways even worse, because its pyramid-like structure was thought to be fair. In other words, it legitimised inequality and, for that reason, all good socialists had a duty to oppose it. He did his bit by writing a dystopian satire called The Rise of the Meritocracy, in which he described just what the meritocratic society of the future would look like.

I’m writing this from New York where I’m spending a few days visiting elementary schools. It feels odd to be back, particularly in my new role as an ‘educationalist’. The last time I was here I was enjoying 15 minutes of fame as a judge in an American food reality show called Top Chef. I flew over in business class, courtesy of NBC, and was whisked to Manhattan in a Lincoln Town Car. This time I’m the guest of Civitas, an education think tank, and the experience is very different. They offered to reimburse my taxi fare from JFK but I thought I’d save them a few dollars by using public transport. This involved getting the AirTrain to Jamaica Station, followed by the Long Island Rail Road to Penn Station and a subway ride to my hotel.

When are you truly middle-aged? ‘The years 20 to 40 are what you might call the fillet steak of life,’ said Philip Larkin. ‘The rest is very much poorer cuts.’ Some might dispute this and put the turning-point at 45, while others will maintain it’s all about how old you feel rather than your biological age. To my mind, the critical factor is when you go through a particular rite of passage. I’m talking about a colonoscopy. I’ve been trying to avoid having one for years, but a recent visit to my GP convinced me I could put it off no longer. After I’d told him about various stomach ailments (I won’t go into details), he asked if any members of my family had ever suffered from bowel cancer. I was shocked.

I was in my garden office on Monday afternoon when I heard a loud noise behind me, as if someone had jumped over the back fence. Seconds later, a strange man walked past the window. I emerged gingerly from my office and found myself face to face with a giant. At first glance, he looked like a basketball player: mixed race, about 6ft 5, in his mid-twenties and built like an athlete. ‘Can I help you?’ I asked. Instead of replying, he vaulted on to the roof of my tool shed and dropped down into my neighbour’s garden. I ran up to the house, told my wife to call the police and then went out on to the street to see if I could spot him.

Last week saw the launch of the Bad Grammar Awards, an annual contest in which prizes are handed out for poor English. Actually, ‘prizes’ is probably the wrong word since no one wants to win them. No one, that is, apart from A.A. Gill. He entered himself and submitted a badly written email that he’d composed specifically. The judges, of whom I was one, considered this but ruled it out on the grounds that Gill would never write as badly as that for the Sunday Times. He may hate grammarians and their pedantic tribe — a point he was trying to make — but his newspaper columns are grammatically sound. A journalist we spent longer on was Isabel Oakeshott, the Sunday Times political editor.