Toby Young

I’ve been spending a lot of time writing jokes recently. Have you heard the one about the next wave of Irish immigrants? Luckily, they’ll be coming by Ryanair so they’ll be indefinitely delayed. Okay, it probably wouldn’t pass muster on Have I Got News For You, but it’s the best I can do. At this time of year I get asked to do a lot of after-dinner speaking and audiences don’t like it if you recycle old material. They want topical gags based on that day’s headlines. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I told the patrons of the Oxford Society at their annual dinner at the House of Commons last week. ‘I had to fight my way through a bunch of sixth-formers at the visitors’ entrance.

One of my tasks as an employee of Vanity Fair back in the mid-1990s was to compose weekly memos to my boss, Graydon Carter. These were supposed to be ‘intelligence briefings’ on the topics dominating the headlines, but I quickly discovered that he had no interest in news and current affairs. The only thing that interested him was gossip. I became the author of a weekly gossip column with a readership of one. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I could easily have parlayed this skill into a career in the State Department. Judging from the latest batch of WikiLeaks, American diplomats spend most of their time gathering tittle-tattle that they can then pass on to their superiors back in Washington.

You have to admire the marketing savvy of Paramount Pictures UK. It has picked the perfect moment to release Waiting for Superman, a 111-minute documentary about the crisis in American education. It comes out this Friday, following hot on the heels of the government’s White Paper on education and Ofsted’s report on Labour’s education record. The conclusion of both the White Paper and Ofsted is that nothing is more important to educational attainment than good teachers and that is also the theme of Waiting for Superman. It follows the fate of half a dozen children, all of whom have applied for places at charter schools. We’re introduced to them at the beginning of the film and then taken on a whirlwind tour of the difficulties besetting American public schools.

As a journalist, I was an enthusiastic supporter of the Freedom of Information Act. It seemed like a powerful tool for holding our political masters to account. However, now that I’m trying to set up a free school the boot is on the other foot. By common consent, the point at which the school becomes real is when the funding agreement is signed. This is the contract between the Secretary of State for Education and the charitable trust that owns and controls the school. Until earlier this year, such trusts were exempt from the scope of the FOI Act but that was changed by an amendment to the Academies Bill in the House of Lords. Academy trusts are now ‘FOI-able’ and that will apply to the trust that will own and control the West London Free School.

Flicking through George W. Bush’s memoirs, one thing that jumped out was the way in which the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom chose to occupy their time together when they first met on W’s ranch in Texas. They spent the evening watching Meet the Parents. Now you might think that’s fairly unusual. Couldn’t they have done something more useful with those few precious hours, such as discussing climate change? Some readers will conclude that this was typical of Bush and Blair, two fundamentally frivolous men. In fact, this is absolutely normal. That’s what heads of state do when they get together — they watch movies. And when they’re not doing that, they talk about movies. How do I know this?

I’m thinking of starting a political campaign. The idea is to draw attention to the rapid decline of one of the most treasured groups in British public life. Once a vital force in the Labour movement, they are now the political equivalent of an endangered species. The campaign will be called ‘Save Our Trots’. Take the efforts of my local NUT rep, Nick Grant, to whip up opposition to the West London Free School. Grant makes no bones about being a Trotskyist — he’s out and proud, as it were — and therein lies the problem. Because everyone knows he’s a member of the Socialist Workers Party, few locals take his political views seriously.

It was around midnight last Friday night that I first became aware something was going on in the street outside my house. I could hear shouting and screaming, but it was the noise of over-exuberant teenagers rather than an escalating argument. I pressed my face up against the patterned glass panel by my front door and, sure enough, I could make out about a dozen teens horsing around on the other side of the road. Most of them were clutching bottles of beer. Like most middle-aged men in this situation, I was torn between a certain amount of sympathy and wanting to call the police. I’m not such an old fart that I’ve forgotten what it was like to be a teenager with nowhere to go on a Friday night.

You’d be forgiven for thinking it was dreamt up by a Notting Hill yummy mummy. Talk to Your Baby is a national campaign that has just been launched by the National Literary Trust and it’s deadly serious. According to the campaign’s website, ‘Talking to young children helps them become good communicators, which is essential if they are to do well at school and lead happy, fulfilled and successful lives.’ It sounds absolutely barmy — the parenting equivalent of talking to plants — but in fact there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that talking to children under three has an almost magical effect on their cognitive development and transforms them into more intelligent adults.

As someone trying to set up a free school, it’s a criticism I hear over and over again: he just wants to secure a free private education for his children at the taxpayer’s expense. Ed Balls has said it, the general secretary of the NUT has said it, Fiona Millar has said it. And it’s always delivered with the same knowing smirk, as if they’ve caught me out. Bad luck, Toby. The gig is up. Time to go home. They’re quite right, of course. And it is a killer blow — against themselves.

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference, where my enthusiasm for the coalition has been dampened by the child benefit cut. As a father of four, I’ll be £3,100 a year worse off. That came as a bit of a blow, particularly as I’d just shelled out £650 for a security pass and £160 to connect to the internet inside the conference centre. It would have been cheaper to fly the kids to Disneyland. Talking to seasoned hacks at The Spectator’s jamboree on Monday night, the conclusion was that it was intended to inflict a bit of misery on the middle classes before the announcement of the spending review. That way, the government can argue that the cuts will be ‘fair’ since people like me will be sharing the pain.

Toby Young's Status Anxiety I’m a pack rat. I can’t bring myself to throw anything away. When Caroline first moved in with me she couldn’t get from one end of our bedroom to the other because every inch of floor space was taken up with piles of old newspapers and magazines. I have lock-ups full of stuff, some of them in New York. At one point, I asked a friend if I could use the space under his stairs to store a cache of second-hand coats I’d bought at a jumble sale. When I wanted to retrieve one five years later, he gave me a blank look and told me he’d moved two years earlier. I haven’t spoken to him since. Our present house is blessed with two large attics — or ‘storage spaces’, as I prefer to call them.

Are architects the new Muslims? They certainly seem to be giving the mullahs a run for their money in the sensitivity stakes. A couple of weeks ago, I had the temerity to question whether a shiny new building actually improved a school’s academic results, and as a result I have incurred the wrath of the entire profession. The offending remarks were included in an interview I did with a trade magazine called Building. ‘Architects have managed effectively to perpetuate the myth that academic attainment is crucially dependent on the building that the school is in,’ I said. ‘And there is just no empirical evidence. Academic attainment is almost wholly independent of the type of building a school is in.’ Cue a tsunami of criticism from architects.

Bad news this week for those who fear we’re becoming a nation of girlie men. According to a survey carried out by Demos, a third of men who graduated from university this summer would give up their careers to care for their children. In addition, more than half the men surveyed said they frequently dress up in women’s clothing, while 66 per cent admitted they still hide behind the sofa during Doctor Who. Okay, I made that last part up, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The feminisation of the latest generation of young men never ceases to amaze me. With their long, blow-dried hair, their expensive designer clothes, their ‘man bags’ and jewellery, they are like some terrifying new genetic hybrid: half-man, half-Barbie doll.

As you may have read, the West London Free School has been included among the ‘first wave’ of schools that have been given the go-ahead by the government to open next year. That’s an important milestone, but we haven’t yet arrived at our destination. In order to reach the Promised Land we’ll have to do battle with the praetorian guard of the educational establishment. As anyone who read The Spectator’s cover story two weeks ago will know, the hard left is prepared to use any means necessary to defeat Michael Gove’s educational reforms. Take Nick Grant, the most energetic opponent of the West London Free School.

There’s a scene at the beginning of The Special Relationship, the third part of Peter Morgan’s Tony Blair trilogy, in which Hillary Clinton offers Blair some advice. ‘People tend to remember you for one thing,’ she says. ‘You have to make sure you define what it is.’ Presumably, Blair’s main reason for writing A Journey is to put a positive spin on his premiership, but he’s left it a little late by Hillary’s standards. The scene above takes place when he’s been in office for less than a month. The point of view of the film — echoing the conventional wisdom — is that Blair will chiefly be remembered for his part in the Iraq war.

Thirty years have passed since I received the envelope containing my O-level results, but I can still recall the moment my eyes scanned the letter. I got a C in English Literature, a Grade 1 in CSE Drama and failed the rest. I relayed the news to my mother and suggested I embark on a residential Work Experience Programme with a view to learning a trade. She enthusiastically endorsed this plan. From that moment on I was fixed on a path of downward social mobility and would now be a labourer were it not for two things. The first one was the Work Experience Programme. The idea was that you tried your hand at various blue-collar professions and earned the same as you would if you were signing on.

One of the advantages of being brought up in large families, supposedly, is that you learn the art of politics at an early age. The idea is that if you’re surrounded by lots of siblings you become skilled at forging alliances, isolating your enemies, and so forth. I didn’t give much credence to this theory until recently, but a change in the dynamic between three of my own children has persuaded me there may be something in it. The top dog among my brood is seven-year-old Sasha. Not only is she better at fighting than her three younger brothers, having been raised on a diet of ultra-violent martial arts cartoons, but she gives no quarter. If five-year-old Ludo is foolish enough to wander into her bedroom, she repels him with a succession of lightning-fast blows to the head.

The summer holidays are upon us and like most people I’ve been taking the opportunity to do a bit of light reading. I’ve put aside the heavy tomes I’ve been wrestling with for the best part of the year and accumulated a vast pile of trashy paperbacks. So far, my favourite ‘beach read’ is The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Talk about junk food for the brain! Its argument, in a nutshell, is that there’s a causal link between inequality and social dysfunction. The more unequal a society, the higher its levels of mental illness, obesity, teenage births, homicides, infant mortality, etc. For that reason, claim the authors, we should struggle to reduce the gap between the richest 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent of wage earners.