Toby Young

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.

When you’ve got as many young children as I have, the prospect of going on holiday anywhere isn’t very appealing. It’s not being somewhere else that’s the problem, though there’s a risk that their sleep patterns will be disrupted. Rather, it’s getting to wherever it is you’re going. How do you keep four children under seven entertained during the journey? This Easter we’re off to Suffolk to stay with my parents-in-law and that means a two-and-a-half-hour drive. One method of passing the time is to get all four children to play I Spy, not easy given their ages. Charlie, our one-year-old, only participates in the guessing part of the game — and he always guesses the same thing, namely, ‘choo choo’.

Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, Gordon Brown’s government has finally done something worth celebrating. Britain is launching an executive space agency that will take control of the money spent on space by the different government departments and science funding bodies. It is a belated response to the surprising success of the UK space industry, which is growing at an average of 9 per cent per annum. At present, it employs 68,000 people and generates revenues of approximately £6.5 billion a year. My late father, Michael Young, would have welcomed the creation of this agency, not least because he proposed it himself over 25 years ago.

I was slightly sceptical of Team Cameron’s decision to unveil their ‘secret weapon’ last Sunday — namely, Dave’s wife Samantha. Not that she isn’t luminously beautiful. And her ability to juggle motherhood with a high-flying career will undoubtedly appeal to many professional women. Rather, it’s her social provenance that concerned me. Wouldn’t her transparently upper-class persona upset what the American journalist Michael Wolff has called the ‘careful tonal balance’ of Cameron’s ‘postmodern transmutation of the class issue’? But, oh, how wrong I was. A couple of days later, the papers were full of stories about the ‘Sam Cam bounce’.

My son Ludo will be celebrating his fifth birthday this weekend with a party at the Build-a-Bear workshop in Westfield. Those of you who don’t have a small child will be blissfully ignorant of this new fad. Build-a-Bear Workshop is a toyshop-cum-factory in which children can construct their very own teddy bears from scratch. The stand-alone stuffed animal isn’t too expensive — they start at £9 — but add accessories and the price ratchets up. For instance, a Pink Beararmoire® Fashion Case is £24 — and Ludo is very keen on fashion. Caroline and I used to pride ourselves on not letting our children become too attached to their stuffed animals or blankets. We know the trouble they can cause.

It’s become an annual tradition, like the first cuckoo of spring. At the beginning of March, when state secondary schools send out acceptance or rejection letters to anxious parents, a New Labour stooge pops up to point out that the majority of parents managed to get their child into their first choice of school. This is proof, apparently, that most parents are happy with the schools their children end up in. A moment’s reflection reveals how spurious this argument is. The fact that a majority of parents manage to secure a place for their child at their first-choice school doesn’t mean they would not have chosen another school had a better one been available.

Earlier this week I was seriously tempted to call the National Bullying Helpline. Ever since I wrote a blog for the Daily Telegraph questioning whether Alexander McQueen really was a ‘genius’, I’ve become a whipping boy on Twitter, the social networking site. The strange thing is, my chief tormentors are fellow journalists. ‘Alexander McQueen: a thundering f***ing pr*** has his say,’ tweeted Alexis Petridis, the Guardian’s chief rock critic, on the day the blog appeared. This prompted a reply from Caitlan Moran, a Times columnist: ‘Toby Young hasn’t done ANYTHING other than be a c*** since 1993.’ Janice Turner, another Times columnist, agreed: ‘I’d love my kids to go to that school set up by T Young.

Like many authors, I include an email address at the end of my books so readers can get in touch to say how much they enjoyed them. That’s the idea, anyway. In fact, the vast majority of reader emails I get are requests for career advice. Take the following, which I received a couple of weeks ago: ‘I recently decided to embark on a little adventure and have moved across the pond to London. I know it is a dreadful time to be looking around for journalism work anywhere, but I was hoping that you might have some suggestions for me on navigating through journalism jobs here in London. I have been on a few interviews so far, but I was thinking that perhaps you might have some tips or ideas for me?

As someone trying to set up a school, I’ve been doing a bit of research into different pedagogic philosophies. What’s the most effective way to teach child-ren, particularly if they’re not that interested to begin with? Should we embrace an old-fashioned approach, with masters standing in front of blackboards reciting Latin verbs? Or a ‘personalised learning programme’ in which children acquire ‘skills’? People on both sides of the argument can point to successful examples. For instance, Maple Walk in Harlesden, one of the schools set up by Civitas, is conservative with a small ‘c’, favouring traditional pedagogy, and has proved a huge success.

A few weeks ago my friend James and his wife got a cat. They live in a leafy street in Holland Park, yet they’re so overprotective they refuse to allow Louis out of the house. His wife won’t even leave him alone, insisting they get a ‘babysitter’ if they go out. As the owner of a streetwise, shorthaired domestic called Trixie, I have been mercilessly taking the piss out of them. Trixie has been able to come and go as she pleases via a cat door since the day she arrived from the Mayhew Animal Shelter 18 months ago. She’s jet black and quite petite, like a miniature panther, and more than a match for any neighbourhood predators. The only precaution I’ve ever taken is to have her microchipped.

‘The basic principle of English social life is that everyone thinks he is a gentleman,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh. ‘There is a second principle of almost equal importance: everyone draws the line of demarcation immediately below his own heels.’ That was written 55 years ago and today almost exactly the opposite is true. According to a Guardian/ICM poll published earlier this week, almost no one in contemporary Britain sees themselves as ‘upper class’. The pollsters didn’t ask the respondents to define ‘upper class’, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a majority of people draw the line of demarcation immediately above their own heads.

Why are local authorities so bad at PR? Don’t they realise they are engaged in a political fight for their lives? The nub of the Tories’ education policy — though they don’t express it like this — is to wrest control of state education away from local authorities. Given that educational provision is the chief responsibility of local authorities, they are in danger of losing their raison d’être. The main criticism of local education authorities is that they haven’t done enough to raise standards. As David Cameron pointed out earlier this week, the number of boys at Eton who received three As at A-level last year is greater than the total number of boys eligible for free school meals who received comparable results.

As a columnist, I’m often asked whether I deliberately place myself in embarrassing situations for the purpose of furnishing myself with comic material. The answer, regrettably, is no. My life is humiliating enough without me having to court embarrassment. However, when I read that a dating site called beautifulpeople.com had expelled over 5,000 members for letting themselves go over the festive period I felt compelled to submit a membership application. This involves uploading a photograph of yourself and then waiting for existing members to decide whether you’re attractive enough to join their exclusive ranks. They have a choice of four responses: ‘Yes, definitely’, ‘Hmm yes, OK’, ‘Hmm no, not really’ and ‘NO definitely NOT’.

If, like me, you’re convinced you’ll never be truly happy until you’ve shinned up the greasy pole it is easy to forget that not every high-status indicator is desirable. For instance, if I had £100 million my wife’s constant threats to divorce me might actually carry some weight. Then there’s the fate that befell David Ross, the co-founder of Carphone Warehouse, over Christmas. I’ve lost count of the number of Lithuanian girls who’ve stormed out of my house at 4 a.m., but since I’m not a ‘Tory tycoon’ the tabloids couldn’t care less. However, all of these disadvantages pale into insignificance next to a letter I saw pinned to a friend’s fridge on New Year’s Day. ‘Dear XXXX,’ it began.

I recently received an email from a friend asking if I would contribute to a book he’s editing entitled What Matters Now: prescriptions for a simpler life. ‘A new genre of literature is emerging about the roots of happiness,’ it began. ‘Authors like Alain de Botton, Oliver James and Naomi Klein argue that the materialist/celebrity culture has left people unhappier than ever. They argue that older and simpler pleasures — a walk in the country, the companionship of family and friends, a beautiful view — provide better oxygen for the soul than the acquisition of more branded goods or the pursuit of money, fame and status.

Shame has descended on the Young household this Christmas. When my wife picked up our four-year-old from school last week she was intercepted by his teacher who wanted a quiet word. ‘Oh no,’ she thought. ‘What’s Ludo done now?’ In fact, it was more a case of what I’d done — or failed to do. The teacher explained that she’d asked the children to write letters to Santa, saying what they wanted for Christmas. At the top of his list Ludo had written: ‘Lite bulb’. When the teacher asked him why he’d chosen such an unusual present he told her that the bulb in his bedroom had stopped working months ago and his deadbeat dad still hadn’t replaced it.