Toby Young

On Sunday I went to the Cheltenham Literary Festival to bang the drum for free schools. I was expecting a warm reception. The local MP is a Lib Dem, but the county council is Conservative. This wouldn’t be like my trip to Manchester last month. Almost as soon as I stepped off the train I was recognised by an anti-government protestor who greeted me with a cry of ‘Fuck off back to London you Tory tosser.’ The first event was a discussion chaired by Marcus Brigstocke in which Natalie Haynes, Shazia Mirza and I had been asked to read three books we wouldn’t normally read. Natalie chose Who Moved My Cheese? and Shazia selected The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and they were both very funny about them.

Caroline went away last Friday, leaving me alone with our four children for the weekend. Given that they’re aged eight and under, and I’d never been in sole charge before, it was something of a test. Could I cope? I hadn’t realised quite how regimented my children’s weekends are until I sat down and digested the three pages of instructions Caroline had left. Saturday mornings, for instance, are parcelled out into 30-minute slots, with tennis lessons, karate lessons and God knows what else. If I was late for one appointment it would create a domino effect, throwing the whole schedule out of whack. There was no room for error. Friday, by contrast, should have been a doddle.

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference in Manchester and I must say it’s nice to be among friends. I mean the drunken hacks at the bar, obviously. This is a conference where we can drink with impunity because, let’s face it, there isn’t much for us to write about. The big story at all the party conferences is ‘splits’ and the reason both this conference and the Lib Dem conference have been so dull is because the split is between the two parties, not within them. This is one of the ancillary benefits of the coalition: the poles around which the government’s internal politics revolve are located in a safe place, quite unlike the previous administration.

I wouldn’t normally take my wife and children to Dumfries and Galloway for the weekend, given the distance and the expense, but the organisers of the Wigtown Literary Festival offered to pay all our rail fares and put us up for the weekend. Wigtown was designated Scotland’s national book town by the Scottish Parliament in 1999 in an effort to breathe new life into it. At the time, it had one of the highest unemployment levels in Scotland following the closure of its two main employers, the creamery and the distillery. The literary festival has taken place ever since. Almost the moment we crossed the border, a drunk buttonholed my wife. ‘You’re boo-ti-full,’ he said, as we sat on the train from Carlisle to Dumfries.

As winter approaches, with snow forecast for next month, I’m anticipating a massive row with my wife. The problem is that Caroline refuses to switch the central heating on before the first day of winter, which falls on 22 December. It doesn’t matter if temperatures plummet to below zero in the interim. ‘Put on an extra jumper,’ is her standard response. As far as she’s concerned, anyone who turns the central heating on before winter has officially arrived is a big girl’s blouse. I sometimes wonder if this is the legacy of having gone to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. As Evelyn Waugh pointed out, anyone who has been to a British public school has no difficulty coping with privations in later life, including prison.

Poor Sophie Dahl. After appearing on the Today programme to make an appeal for charitable donations to the Roald Dahl Museum, she has become an object of ­ridicule. This was partly prompted by the amount of money she was asking for and the use for which it was intended: £500,000 does seem like rather a lot to fund the relocation of Dahl’s writing shed from the bottom of her grandmother’s garden to the nearby museum in Great Missenden. A couple of years ago I erected a ‘writing shed’ at the bottom of my garden — at least, that’s how I described it to my wife — and the total cost was approximately £12,500. But as Dahl pointed out to the interviewer, moving the shed is quite a process and involves a lot of archivists.

I’m writing this the day before the West London Free School is due to open and it’s not an exaggeration to say I’ve been looking forward to this moment for two years. The thought of our first cohort of pupils streaming through the gates, resplendent in their WLFS blazers, has sustained me through many a dark hour.   I was hoping to be in tip-top shape for this auspicious occasion and booked a ten-day holiday in Cornwall. The idea was to switch off the iPhone, get out the boogie board and spend my time frolicking in the surf with my lovely wife. Trouble is, we were sharing our holiday cottage with some friends and the other husband turned out to be better at everything than me. Surfing, map-reading, canoeing — you name it.

Next Friday, Boris Johnson will officially open the West London Free School. I’m particularly pleased that the ribbon is being cut by a former editor of this magazine. Next Friday, Boris Johnson will officially open the West London Free School. I’m particularly pleased that the ribbon is being cut by a former editor of this magazine. Not only is The Spectator my longest-standing employer and my spiritual home — I’ve been a columnist for 13 years — but many of the ideas that have informed the set-up of the school were first rehearsed in these pages. It’s also appropriate in another respect, because it was encountering Boris at Oxford that first made me aware of the huge gulf between the private and state education sector.

Don’t be fooled – you’d get into Oxford Rachel Johnson calls to tell me she’s doing a piece for the Financial Times saying she wouldn’t have got into Oxford if she’d been applying this year. She’s quite wrong, of course. A myth has grown up among my generation of Oxford graduates that it’s harder for their children to get in than it was for them, when in fact the opposite is true. There are two reasons why they think this. First, they mistakenly believe that getting two As and an A* in their A-levels — the standard Oxford offer today — is beyond them. This ignores the rampant grade inflation of the past 25 years.

As I write this, my face and hands are covered in scabs. I’d love to say I sustained these injuries while trying to save the Oxfam shop on Ealing Green from looters. (It was looted, by the way.) But the truth is I fell off my bike on the way to lunch with another journalist. The brake cable got tangled up in the front wheel and the bike came to an abrupt halt. No stitches, but I look terrible, as though someone has tried to carve a map of the world into my face. This was a blessing in disguise because it meant I turned down an opportunity to appear alongside David Starkey on Newsnight last Friday. Had I done so, I’m not confident I would have challenged his remarks that the whole world and his dog have condemned as ‘racist’.

At first, I thought he was the site foreman. He was in his mid-40s, well-built, standing in front of a building site on Madeley Road in Ealing. This leafy suburb in west London, which is about two miles from my house in Acton, was the scene of some of the worst rioting on Monday night and I had cycled over there the following day to try and help with the clean-up. I took a detour via Madeley Road on my way home. On closer inspection, the house I’d taken to be a building site was just an ordinary home — or what was left of it — after a gang of thugs had tried to smash their way in the previous night. The man standing at the front gate, arms folded like a bouncer, was the householder. ‘There were between 30 and 40 of them,’ he said.

Sometimes, burglars really do mess with the Wrong Guy At 4.20 a.m. last Friday, my friend and neighbour was awoken by the sound of breaking glass. It was one of the panels in his front door and when the noise had died away he could make out the voices of two young men intent on entering his house. Lying next to him was his wife and, in adjacent bedrooms, their three young daughters. As he lay in bed wondering what to do, it occurred to him that the two men trying to break into his house had no reason to think it wasn’t occupied. On the contrary, his car was in the driveway and his bull terrier was in its basket in the hall. Whatever these men intended to do, they had clearly taken into account that the house was occupied by a young family.

What’s the secret of successful parenting? Like most middle-class parents, I don’t just want my children to be happy. I want them to have proper careers as well. I’d like each of them to go to a Russell Group university — ideally Oxford or Cambridge — and then do a further degree. If they win a scholarship to do postgraduate work at Harvard or Yale, so much the better. And I want them to achieve all this without spending a penny on their education. The only parenting guide I’ve ever read is Andrew Gimson’s biography of Boris Johnson. You won’t find it in the ‘Parenting’ section of Waterstone’s, but it’s a font of useful information nevertheless.

Wow. As I’m writing this, Wendi Deng is scanning the House of Commons committee room, searching for any additional assailants, as her husband and son-in-law are testifying before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. Ten minutes earlier, she launched herself like a missile at a pie-throwing protestor, delivering a stinging blow to his face. It was something to behold: the tiger wife in full battle cry. Moments later, dollops of shaving foam were dripping down the hapless protestor’s face. Not just a loyal and devoted wife, but her family’s head of security as well. The stupidity of Jonnie Marbles, the anti-cuts protestor in question, is staggering.

Many people have accused me of toadying up to the Murdoch gang in the past week or so, since I’m one of the few journalists willing to go on record to defend the Dirty Digger. Actually, it’s out of conviction rather than any hope of preferment. I really do believe that, on balance, Murdoch has been a force for good in our industry. Not only has he subsidised the Times, keeping it afloat in spite of its losses, but he broke the back of the British print unions and in doing so provided the newspaper business with a new lease of life. Had he not challenged the unions’ restrictive practices, the Independent and Independent on Sunday might never have been launched and it’s doubtful the Guardian and Observer would have survived until now.

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety Forgive me if I don’t join in the orgy of sanctimony surrounding the News of the World. If any evidence is uncovered that proves a member of the paper’s staff hacked into Milly Dowler’s phone and deleted her voicemail messages, then, yes, he or she should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But to describe such behaviour as ‘shocking’ is to reveal an astonishing ignorance about the tabloid profession. It’s a bit like claiming to be ‘shocked’ when a celebrity is caught cheating on his wife or a politician is caught lying through his teeth.

Someone has sent me an extraordinary newsletter from the outgoing secretary of the North Yorkshire NUT. It provides a unique insight into the leadership of the most militant of the teaching unions. As anyone with a child at school will know, the NUT has been instrumental in organising this week’s ‘day of action’ in the hope of closing as many schools as possible across the country. Some of it is just boilerplate. For instance, there’s a quote from Fiona Millar claiming that the coalition’s academy programme is an abysmal failure. In fact, more than 450 academies have opened since last September — bringing the total to over 650.