Toby Young

In my last Spectator column, I mounted a polemical defence of Michael Gove’s GCSEs reforms and, in the course of advancing my argument, I made a claim that I’ve subsequently been hounded about. Indeed, a website called fullfact.org mounted an investigation into this claim and concluded that I was guilty of ‘gross exaggeration’. Needless to say, my political opponents have seized upon this and accused me of making stuff up out of whole cloth. In their eyes, I’m now a right-wing version of Johann Hari. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to discuss the charge.

On the principle that you should know your enemy, I’ve spent the last few days trying to work out where the critics of Michael Gove’s GCSE reforms are coming from. Why does anyone object to introducing more rigour into the classroom? Just to be clear, the last government presided over a period of relentless dumbing down. As GCSE results continually improved, England plummeted in the OECD’s international league tables. In 2000, our 15-year-olds were eighth in the world for maths. By 2009, they’d fallen to 27th.

Around the middle of last year, I was approached by the writer Tim Lott to see if I’d like to be a judge in the annual literary competition he organises. On the face of it, the prospect wasn’t very appealing. It’s a romantic fiction prize and who wants to read dozens of chick lit novels, particularly as there’s no fee? But Le Prince Maurice Prize does have one thing going for it. The prizegiving takes place at the Prince Maurice Hotel in Mauritius and the judges get to spend a week there — all expenses paid. ‘Can I bring my wife and four children?’ I asked. ‘Er, no. ’Fraid not,’ said Tim. ‘Count me in.’ As you can imagine, it took some doing to square this with Caroline.

A few weeks ago, I went to a party at Paul and Marigold Johnson’s house and fell into conversation with Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, a journalistic idol of mine. In addition to being one of Britain’s foremost conservative intellectuals, he was my first proper boss on Fleet Street. He employed me to write opinion pieces and profiles for the Sunday Telegraph in 1990 and his editorial comments were always shrewd and helpful. We talked about a range of subjects, including David Cameron’s premiership and whether Boris Johnson would make a good leader of the Conservative party. But the topic we spent the most time on was the future of the United Kingdom.

I’ve just returned from a middle-class camping holiday. I don’t mean one of those camping weekends that doubles as a literary festival, like Port Eliot in Cornwall. I mean I’ve just spent three nights at a campsite that is middle-class all year round. Blackberry Wood in Sussex is about ten miles from Brighton and while there isn’t actually a sign on the gate saying ‘No Riff Raff’, you’re very much in BBC1 sitcom territory circa 1976. I kept expecting to bump into Margo and Jerry in the washing-up area. As you’d expect, there are numerous rules of etiquette that aren’t written down anywhere but are religiously observed. Personal computers, for instance, are frowned upon.

It won’t surprise many people to learn that the British Olympian selected to carry Team GB’s flag at the opening ceremony tomorrow went to a private school. Triple gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy attended George Watson’s College, a Scottish independent school established in 1741. Annual fees are a fraction under £10,000. Earlier this month, the Prime Minister complained that a third of the athletes representing Britain at the Games were privately educated and blamed state schools for failing to encourage sporting excellence. As several commentators pointed out, that was a bit rich given that the last Conservative government did little to discourage comprehensives from selling off their playing fields.

I always thought it was something that happened to other men as they got older, but not me. I was different. Owing to my extraordinary machismo and strength of character, I would not experience this ‘life change’ until I was at least 75 — and at that point I would just take a pill to restore my virility. But it’s no good. Turns out we all suffer from this affliction in middle age, no matter how determined we are to keep our peckers up. I have succumbed. I’ve taken up gardening. OK, ‘gardening’ is the wrong word. It conjures up images of elderly women in floppy hats, stooping over their gladioli. I am not a gardener. I am a tomato specialist.

At the conclusion of the Wimbledon final, after Andrew Murray’s big girl’s blouse routine, I was tempted to tweet something uncharitable about men who cry in public. I don’t consider myself to be a stick-in-the-mud reactionary, but there’s something about men who turn on the waterworks that brings out my inner Sir Bufton Tufton. Whatever happened to the stiff upper lip? But I thought better of it. I’d only be deluged with hundreds of angry responses from those who found the sorry spectacle ‘honest’ and ‘moving’. Twitter is the perfect medium for herd opinion. If you say something genuinely heretical, the Twittersphere lights up with indignation. It’s like a machine for enforcing politically correct dogma.

Roxy Mark II is dead. I hoped I’d never have to write those words, but there’s no doubt about the matter. I don’t mean our replacement hamster has escaped like the first one (current whereabouts unknown). I mean she’s expired. She’s not resting. She’s passed on. She is no more. She has gone to meet her maker. I first learnt the news when I was travelling in East Africa a couple of weeks ago. Caroline called in a state of panic to say she ‘thought’ Roxy was dead.  ‘She’s not moving,’ she said. ‘I forgot to feed her. D’you think she’s died of starvation?’ ‘Oh Jesus,’ I replied. ‘Not another one?’ ‘Sasha’s right, isn’t she?

I’m writing this after one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I’m currently staying with my friends John and Louise on their farm in East Africa and on Monday John arranged for the two of us to go out on a ‘rough shoot’ in the bush. There are plenty of good game birds in season here, including sandgrouse, francolin and helmeted guinea fowl, and a ‘rough shoot’ is a great way to see some of the other wildlife, like zebras and giraffes. However, there are animals that are best avoided. One of John’s neighbours warned us about a certain bull buffalo that he didn’t like the look of. And most dangerous of all are the elephants. As a child brought up on Babar and Tarzan films, I had no idea that elephants could be so lethal.

As you read this, I’ll be preparing to give an after-dinner speech at one of the oldest prep schools in Kenya. The school motto is Fortuna Favet Fortibus, so my theme is going to be the importance of character. I’m going to ask whether there’s any point in spending upwards of £30,000 a year to send your child to an English public school — a decision that many of the Kenyan parents will shortly have to make. If one of the purposes of a good education is to teach their children resilience in the face of adversity, wouldn’t they be better off sending them to a state school in Nairobi? This is partly for provocative reasons. On the night I’ll be speaking, the audience will be crawling with agents for top public schools.

It’s not every day the Queen invites you to tea. Admittedly, I’m not alone in being granted that honour. At the Royal Garden Party I went to last week, I was among several thousand dignitaries craning their necks to get a glimpse of Her Majesty. But it was still a lovely day out — more deeply affecting than I thought it would be. The reason I was invited is because of my ‘service to the community’, which I assume is a reference to the West London Free School. I don’t suppose the Queen herself has been following my progress in the pages of this magazine — though you never know. Rather, my name was one of dozens put forward by the Department for Education in 2012 for ‘service to the community’.

I was staying with my family in Devon last weekend when my son Ludo spotted that the Olympic Torch Relay was due to pass through Dartmouth on Sunday morning. ‘Can we go, Daddy?’ he asked. ‘Please, please, please?’ Dartmouth was only ten minutes from the cottage we were renting, so it seemed churlish to refuse. Caroline and the other children were quite excited by the prospect, too. Even my curiosity was piqued. I envisaged a distinguished Olympian running with the torch, followed by a squad of young hopefuls. A scene from the director’s cut of Chariots of Fire. We arrived in Dartmouth at about 11 a.m., having read on the Torch Relay website that the parade was due to arrive at 11.25 a.m., and took up our positions on the pavement.

When the government announced its new £5 million parenting project last week I thought I should offer to help. I have four children, after all, so know a thing or two about the subject. I sent a message via Twitter to the owner of the Parent Gym, one of the ­organisations involved in the scheme. ‘I’d be happy to donate all my Spectator columns on parenting,’ I said. ‘You could reproduce them as an example of what not to do.’ It was a joke, obviously. Middle-class dads trade anecdotes in the park on Saturday mornings about what crap parents they are, but the fact that they’re in the park with their children — usually playing football or cricket — demonstrates that they’re actually doing a pretty good job.

Hamster-gate continues. Last Saturday, Caroline and I went out to dinner, leaving the children playing with Roxy in the company of a babysitter. I told them to put her back in her cage before they went to bed, making sure that all doors, etc. were securely fastened. In order to make sure they complied, I stressed that the consequence of her escaping would be certain death — just as I had before we lost Roxy Mark I. When we came home at midnight, I checked the cage just to make sure the children had followed my instructions and, to my horror, discovered that the lid to Roxy’s sleeping compartment hadn’t been screwed down properly. Sure enough, the little Houdini had escaped.