Toby Young

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.

It has been described as the most radical overhaul of the school system since the introduction of comprehensives. Ed Balls condemned it as ‘the most profoundly unfair piece of social engineering in this generation’. Yet on Monday night, the 2010 Academies Bill was passed by 317 votes to 225. Clearly, to be condemned so vehemently by the shadow education secretary is a badge of honour and not something I’d want to take away from Michael Gove. The boy done good. But to any impartial observer the most distinctive thing about the 2010 Academies Act is just how modest it is. Take Section 12, which stipulates that only charities are allowed to set up academies.

It’s the summer and that means the festival season is upon us. I say that as if I’m a veteran of the festival circuit when, in fact, the last one I went to was Hood Fayre (sic) in Totnes in 1980. That was the year I took my O-levels and I remember sitting in a tent, sucking on a Camberwell Carrot, when I bumped into my History teacher. ‘Shouldn’t you be revising?’ he said. It won’t surprise you to learn that I failed everything apart from Eng Lit. Some 30 years later, I decided to dip another toe in the water. Caroline and I were offered a free day pass to Latitude last Sunday, the annual Suffolk music festival, and since we were going to be in East Anglia anyway it seemed like a good idea. Conse-quently, at 11 a.m.

It was too good an invitation to turn down. My friend James had managed to get a reservation at Noma, recently named best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine. True, it’s in Copenhagen, but James offered to use his air miles to get me a ticket if I paid for lunch. ‘You’re on,’ I said. On the face of it, there’s something a little odd about this gastronomic landmark being in Denmark. I don’t mean that the Danes aren’t famous for their food. It’s more that you wouldn’t expect to find such a potent symbol of plutocratic excess in the world’s most socially democratic country.

In the last few weeks my life has begun to resemble the plot of a Hollywood B movie. An alpha male has invaded my home, terrorised my children and enslaved my wife. If I raise the slightest objection to anything he does, he kicks me in the balls. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I have become his bitch, running and dashing to satisfy his every need. I’m talking about my two-year-old son Charlie. He has always been my most difficult child, refusing to sleep through the night, prone to tantrums, etc. But until recently he existed on the periphery of my life. He was a little ball of anger, thrashing around on the floor and howling with fury. He was someone who had to be stepped over rather than engaged with.

Last week the BBC website ran a story about some new research casting doubt on the effectiveness of free schools. ‘The Swedish model of free schools, lauded by the Conservatives, has not significantly improved pupils’ academic achievement, a study suggests,’ it began. So what was this study? It purports to be a paper written by ‘Rebecca Allen’, a lecturer at the ‘Institute of Education’. Is this organisation for real? If you visit the website for the ‘Institute’, the suspicion starts to creep in that it is a brilliant hoax devised by a fiendishly clever group of satirists.

I haven’t yet calculated how much worse off I’ll be as a result of the budget but it’s time to start belt-tightening. My first austerity measure has been to buy a tent. I’ve been invited to speak at a literary festival in Cornwall but the organiser doesn’t consider me important enough to offer me a room in his house. One of his retainers suggested I hire a yurt, apparently unaware that the cost of doing so is over £800. In the end I decided to buy a family tent from Halfords for £89.99. Pretty reasonable, particularly as the price included two air beds, four sleeping bags and a couple of torches. Caroline thought it would be sensible to practise putting it up beforehand so I dragged it out into my back garden last Saturday for a dummy run.

Until last week I didn’t have much time for Ben Goldacre, the Guardian journalist and author of Bad Science. He devotes his life to the exposure of snake oil salesmen, whether nutritionists with bogus qualifications or practitioners of alternative medicine, pointing out that there is no scientific basis for their claims. A useful service, to be sure, but he suffers from the Guardian columnist’s vice of being overly puritanical. He combines superciliousness with moral superiority, as if ignorance and stupidity are to be condemned rather than pitied. He is a self-proclaimed atheist, but exhibits a near religious attachment to the empirical method. So what’s changed? The answer is that my three-year-old son Freddie has come down with chicken pox.

In hindsight, it probably wasn’t very wise to invite a German girl to come on holiday with me during the World Cup. This was in 1990 and I was staying at my parents’ house in the South of France. Rather shamefully, I cannot now remember her name. She was tall and blonde and writing a dissertation on the history of the Third Reich. I picked her up on Cambridge High Street. Few were expecting great things of England at Italia ’90. Under Bobby Robson’s stewardship, England had failed to qualify for Euro ’84, failed to qualify for Euro ’88 and only just squeaked into the knockout stage of the ’86 World Cup. At the beginning of the 1990 tournament, Robson had already announced his intention to retire as manager.

I’m writing this from the Hay Festival which seems to be populated by an unusually large number of government ministers. I spotted Michael Gove wandering along Newport Street eating an ice cream on Sunday afternoon and later this week I’m hoping to catch Nick Clegg being interviewed by Philippe Sands. If this annual gathering of the liberal intelligentsia is anything to go by, the Guardian-reading classes are completely at ease with the coalition government. This was evident in a very good-humoured event I attended at which Jon Snow, the urbane Channel 4 newsreader, interviewed David Willetts, the Minister of State for Universities and Science. Willetts is in town to promote The Pinch, his attack on the Baby Boomers for feathering their nest at the expense of their children.

This promised to be an awkward encounter. I was invited on to Newsnight on Tuesday to discuss the education bill in the Queen’s Speech and my opponent was to be Ed Balls. For me, this was a bit like an Albanian dissident being asked to participate in a studio discussion with Enver Hoxa. During the general election campaign I was an enthusiastic supporter of Antony Calvert, Balls’s Conservative opponent in Morley and Outwood, and published numerous articles taking him to task over his record as Gordon Brown’s schools secretary. Since then, I’ve become an energetic opponent of his bid to become the next leader of the Labour party.

To the untrained eye, the social gulf that separates David Cameron and Nick Clegg is hard to spot. They are both sons of financiers, both ex-public schoolboys, both the products of elite English universities and both in their early forties. Indeed, when they gave their joint press conference in the Rose Garden last week it was reminiscent of the final scene in A Comedy of Errors in which two twin brothers are reunited after being separated at birth. However, for those well versed in the manners and habits of the educated bourgeoisie, the differences between them could hardly be more pronounced. Cameron likes to remain aloof, whereas Clegg likes to be the centre of attention; Cameron is inner-directed, while Clegg is outer-directed; Cameron wants to be feared, Clegg wants to be loved.

Over the past five weeks I have often found myself cursing the British public. I cursed them when Labour’s support started climbing in the opinion polls, grumbling about how some people didn’t deserve to vote. I cursed them when they flocked to the Lib Dem banner following Nick Clegg’s performance in the first debate, complaining about the madness of crowds. And I cursed them on election night when it looked as though they’d granted Gordon Brown a stay of execution, leaving open the possibility that he could cobble together a ‘coalition of the losers’. In the end, though, they’ve got the outcome they wanted and probably the one that’s best for the country.