Toby Young

I think I may soon have enough material for another comic memoir, this one charting my increasingly accident-prone career as a political campaigner. I’m not talking about setting up the West London Free School, which is still going swimmingly, but the strange direction my career has taken as a consequence of the political platform the school has given me. In How to Lose Friends and Alienate People in Westminster, I would blunder from one disaster to another, giving Gordon Brown a run for his money as the Mr Bean of politics. Who knows, it could even become the basis for an amusing sitcom in which Simon Pegg reprises his role as me. Not so much Yes, Minister as Your Fly’s Undone, Minister.

I received a shocking letter from a 15-year-old schoolgirl called Carola Binney last week. It was a real marmalade dropper. In all my years I’d never seen anything quite like it. Had she really spent the past 11 years in full-time education? It scarcely seemed possible, not at a British school. To my astonishment, all the words were spelt correctly and it didn’t contain a single grammatical error. Earlier this week, the CBI disclosed that 44 per cent of businesses are forced to provide school and college leavers with remedial English lessons, so poor are their writing skills. British schoolchildren simply aren’t taught grammar any more, a deficiency that isn’t confined to the state sector.

Until now, I thought David Cameron’s best week in politics was the one that began with the inconclusive result of the general election and ended with him standing beside Nick Clegg in the Downing Street rose garden. The skill with which he outmanoeuvred Gordon Brown reminded me of a comment made by Oliver van Oss, a former beak at Eton, about the Wall Game in Andrew Gimson’s biography of Boris Johnson. ‘It provides the perfect training for later work on boards, committees, royal commissions and governing bodies,’ he said. ‘The unmovable and the irresistible are poised in perfect balance. Nothing is happening and it seems unlikely that anything ever will. Then, for two seconds or so, the situation becomes fluid.

I came in late the other night to discover my wife watching One Born Every Minute, a Channel 4 programme featuring women having babies. I sat down next to her on the sofa and it wasn’t long before my hands were clamped over my eyes. A young woman was howling in pain as her insides were twisted into a pretzel, with all manner of unspeakable muck seeping out on to the bedsheets. As her ordeal came to an end, after hour upon hour of screaming agony, the hospital room looked like a butcher’s shop that had been blown up with a cluster bomb. ‘They should show this to 14-year-old girls,’ I said to Caroline. ‘It’s the most effective form of birth control I’ve ever seen.’ She shot me a guilty look. ‘Darling?’ she said.

Government reports don’t often make scintillating reading. But the Review of Education Capital by Sebastian James is an exception. Colloquially known as the James Review, it’s an investigation into Building Schools for the Future, a programme of capital expenditure on schools overseen by the last government. It also contains various proposals as to how education capital might be better spent in future. Sebastian James is the group operations director of Dixons Retail and, reading between the lines, it’s clear that he’s appalled by the level of inefficiency and waste he uncovered.

On Tuesday I received an invitation from the Women’s Institute asking me if I’d be prepared to participate in a debate at their annual general meeting in Liverpool on 8 June. They want me to speak ‘in opposition to a motion urging central government to maintain support for local libraries’. You have to take your hat off to the Labour party spin machine. It has successfully propagated the myth that the government is directly responsible for the closure of local libraries. In my reply to the WI, I said I’d be delighted to speak in its debate but pointed out it was a bit nonsensical to urge the government to continue to do something it’s never actually done. Isn’t the WI aware that councils are responsible for the upkeep of libraries? Evidently not.

Last Saturday, I took my six-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter to the gym at a local school so they could take a karate ‘exam’. If they passed, they would be eligible for a white belt with red stripes — the first rung of the ladder in the Shukokai Karate Association. I have to confess to a certain scepticism about the usefulness of this ‘martial art’. I initially thought it might provide Sasha and Ludo with a way of fending off potential muggers, but I now realise it’s the karate instructors themselves who are doing the mugging. Apart from the cost of the weekly lessons (£10.90), there’s the kit (£26), the ‘master classes’ (£26) and the accessories (£££s).

My son Ludo celebrated his sixth birthday last week and one of his friends gave him a miniature air-hockey game. It’s like the ones you see in amusement arcades, with two pushers, a puck and a goal at either end, but no bigger than a box of Cornflakes. When it was my turn to get up with the children on Sunday, I decided to start the day with an air-hockey tournament. Nothing like a bit of sibling rivalry to get the competitive juices flowing, I thought. The opening match was between Ludo and Freddie, his three-year-old brother. Ludo won the first six points comfortably and looked all set to cruise to victory. Then something strange happened.

For critics of state education, locked in combat with the teaching unions, it is easy to overlook the fact that some comprehensives do an outstanding job. One example in my neck of the woods is Cardinal Vaughan, a Roman Catholic boys’ school. Last year, 90 per cent of its pupils got five good GCSEs, making it the best performer in Kensington and Chelsea, and this year 13 of its pupils have been offered places at Oxford and Cambridge. And Vaughan is completely non-selective, beyond the requirement that its pupils have to be Catholics. It has a fair banding policy whereby a quarter of each year group are in the top ability band, half in the middle and a quarter in the bottom. Of course, like every successful comprehensive, the Vaughan has its critics.

I find it hard not to feel sorry for the Duke of York. Being asked to denounce one’s friends, however unsavoury, can’t be much fun. It must be particularly galling when the politicians insisting on this act of obeisance were themselves hobnobbing with Hosni Mubarak, Zine-al-Abidine and Colonel Gaddafi until about a week ago. In the Duke’s defence, I don’t see why people in public life should be forced to hold their friends to a higher standard than the rest of us. Prince Andrew is no more responsible for the behaviour of Jeffrey Epstein than Boris Johnson is for Darius Guppy’s. I can pinpoint the exact moment Sean Langan became my best friend. It was at William Ellis and we were in the Sixth Form Common Room about to head out for coffee.

One of the most important milestones in the course of setting up a taxpayer-funded school is the funding agreement. This is a contract between the Secretary of State for Education and the trustees of the school setting out the terms on which he agrees to finance the school. He can terminate the agreement in certain exceptional circumstances, but shutting down schools is never popular and he’s usually required to give seven years’ notice. For that reason, it’s not something he enters into lightly. He has to satisfy himself that the school can meet various educational standards, that it has found a suitable site and that there will be sufficient parental demand to make it financially viable in the long term. Perhaps most importantly, it’s an act of trust.

You have to take your hat off to Michael Gove. In spite of the Herculean task he has saddled himself with — saving the state education system of this country — he has managed to find time to produce a brilliant piece of satire. I’m referring to a blog on the Local Schools Network entitled ‘Celebrating diversity at Stoke Newington School’. The Local Schools Network is a website that exists primarily to disseminate smears and lies about free schools. It boasts the patronage of Fiona Millar and Melissa Benn, but by far its most energetic contributor is Francis Gilbert, a media studies teacher in Bethnal Green. Gilbert has devoted himself, body and soul, to frustrating the efforts of parents and teachers to set up schools.

Since the coalition came to power, a consensus seems to have sprung up on the left that tax avoidance is wrong. Not tax evasion — which everyone agrees is wrong — but avoidance. A campaigning organisation called UK Uncut has sprung up that uses social media to organise sit-ins in high street branches of Top Shop, Boots and Vodafone to protest about it. Last week, I questioned this thinking in a review of a book on tax havens in the Mail on Sunday. I pointed out that when we buy orange juice made from concentrate, which is zero-rated for VAT, because it’s cheaper than the freshly squeezed variety, we are avoiding paying tax.

As an iconoclastic journalist, I’m used to being attacked. As an iconoclastic journalist, I’m used to being attacked. It comes with the territory and after 25 years I’ve developed quite a thick skin. But ever since I started leading the efforts of a group of parents and teachers to set up a free school in west London, the level of vitriol directed against me has increased a thousandfold. In a bizarre twist of fate, I’ve only become a truly reviled figure since I decided to do something good. Scarcely a day passes without someone on the left launching a vicious personal attack. I naively thought that my opponents might respect the Sabbath, but last Sunday I had to contend with the latest broadside from Fiona Millar, a former aide to Cherie Blair.

Like many of my colleagues in the media, I’m shocked by the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. As the list of those targeted by the newspaper grows longer and longer, my sense of outrage deepens. What were the papers’ executives thinking? Did it not even occur to them to tap my phone? OK, OK, I’m not an A-lister. I’m not even on the B-list. My ­status ­hovers somewhere between C-list and D-list (on a good day). But if you look at the people queuing up to sue the paper, some of them are below even me in the celebrity pecking order. George Galloway I can understand. He was the leader of a political party at the time, even if he isn’t now. And Bob Crow I can forgive.

Fantastic news about The King’s Speech. Its 12 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Screenplay, mean it’s just two short of the all-time record. The film has also been a box-office smash, taking over $57 million in America and over £18 million in the UK. Why has the film been such a critical and commercial success? It has plenty going for it: great direction, good performances, gripping story, witty dialogue. But then, so did Made in Dagenham and that hasn’t been anything like as successful. The key is in the subject matter. Our royal family is still a subject of universal fascination, practically the only one we have left.

I appeared on Radio 4’s PM programme earlier this week as a token male chauvinist pig. The issue under discussion was the government’s proposal to make it possible for fathers to take up to six months’ paternity leave. I argued this was bad news for dads since it means we’ll no longer have a much-needed excuse for going back to work the moment there’s a newborn in the house. I wondered beforehand whether my opponent would be a harridan feminist or a wet man and the answer was a wet man: Rob Williams, chief executive of something called the ‘Fatherhood Institute’. He wasn’t in the studio, so I couldn’t tell whether he was wearing a pinny, but he didn’t sound particularly red-blooded.