Toby Young

By the time you’re reading this, David Cameron will probably have made up his mind about how to respond to the Leveson report. For members of my trade, it will be the defining moment of his premiership. I’m not all that optimistic. I bumped into a Conservative whip last week who said he thought it would be difficult for the PM to ignore Leveson if he recommends statutory regulation, however much he’d like to. He trotted out the familiar line that Cameron will be under enormous political pressure to implement Leveson’s proposals, both from the Lib Dems and some of his own backbenchers.

For those of us who write for the tabloids, there’s something almost poetic about the crisis currently engulfing our more respectable rivals. Ever since the Guardian ‘exposed’ the News of the World for deleting Milly Dowler’s voicemails — a story that turned out to be wrong — we have had to endure the moral censure of the establishment. That is, senior politicians, judges, A-list celebrities and those members of our own profession who describe themselves as ‘serious’, which is code for Oxbridge-educated and liberal. There’s no great mystery as to why they look down on muckraking journalists with such disdain.

My friend Cosmo Landesman and I recently thought of an idea for a toilet book over lunch. Called ‘You Know You’re Getting Old When…’, it would be a compendium of all those moments when you suddenly get a whiff of mortality. By the end of the meal, the table was littered with paper napkins, all covered in our spidery scrawl. For instance, under the heading ‘Men and their bodies’, we came up with the following: ‘You know you’re getting old when… you let out an involuntary fart when you bend over.’ Not funny? OK, try this. Under ‘Around the house’: ‘You know you’re getting old when… you’re yelling at the radio. But the radio isn’t on.’ OK, OK. Last one, I promise.

There was quite an important news story buried beneath all the post-match analysis from the party conferences. Apparently there really is life after death. Perhaps the reason this ‘news’ didn’t receive more coverage is because it’s not based on any startling new evidence. Rather, the claim has been made by a man called Eben Alexander who had one of those near-death experiences that cannot be explained by science. What’s startling about this particular experience is that Dr Eben Alexander III, to give him his full name, is a neurosurgeon. Not a scientist, exactly, but a man of science nevertheless.

I’m writing this from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where I’ve been asking more or less everyone the same question: ‘When David Cameron gracefully exits the political stage in 2018, having won a thumping majority in 2015, who do you most want to succeed him: Boris Johnson or Michael Gove?’ The popular choice is BoJo, obviously. In his diaries, Alan Clark used the phrase ‘Fuhrer Kontakt’ to describe the electrifying current that pulsed through him whenever he encountered Margaret Thatcher in the corridors of the House of Commons and there is only one Conservative politician who has a comparable effect today. Like Thatcher, Boris combines tremendous force of personality with a dash of vulnerability – an irresistible cocktail.

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.