Toby Young

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.

Four weeks ago, I made one of the toughest decisions of my life. Ever since I was a child I’ve known I was different but I’ve done my best to conceal that fact. For most of my adult life I’ve pretended to be ‘normal’ and my late mother, God bless her, went to her grave without knowing the truth. But I cannot continue to live a lie. At the beginning of the election campaign I finally came out. Ladies and gentleman, I am a Tory. Not surprisingly, many of my friends said they already knew this. Indeed, they claimed to be amused to discover I was under the impression that I had successfully concealed it from them. As one of them put it, the closet I was in had a glass door. ‘Surely, no one is shocked by the news?’ asked a Facebook friend.

As the leader of a group of parents trying to set up Britain’s first free school, I’ve been spending the past week or so frantically mugging up on the Liberal Democrats’ education policy. In the event of a hung parliament, would the Lib Dems support the Conservatives’ educational reforms? On the face of it, the answer’s no. One of the ways in which the Tories are proposing to make life easier for groups like mine is to take away the veto that local authorities have over the creation of new academies. My local council is Conservative-controlled and will probably remain so after 6 May, but as we saw from the remarks of Paul Carter, the leader of Kent County Council, not all Tory councillors see eye-to-eye with the national party on this.

It is now generally accepted that David Cameron made a colossal blunder in agreeing to the televised debates. Had last Thursday’s debate not taken place, the Conservatives would still have a comfortable lead over the other two main parties, on track for a small overall majority. Yet among the commentariat — even those in the blue camp — the consensus is that the debates are good for politics. Whatever the outcome of the election, the British public will have made a more informed decision about whom to vote for. In particular, large swaths of the electorate who might otherwise remain disaffected will have been engaged by the televised debates. But are they really good for the common weal?

Just how much appetite is there for David Cameron’s Big Society? Not much, according to the chattering classes. One of the more bizarre sights on the day the Conservatives’ launched their manifesto was watching the liberal left poo-poo the notion that ordinary people could be ‘prised away from the telly’. Jackie Ashley in the Guardian, for instance, had never heard of such a preposterous idea. ‘Modern life is so busy, with longer working hours, 24-hour TV, emails, blogging, tweeting and the rest, that I wonder how many people will find the time to go along and organise their local school or hospital or police force,’ she wrote. Funny to think that empowering ordinary citizens was once a rallying cry of the Labour party.