Toby Young

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.

At the age of 25, the poet and critic William Ernest Henley lay in hospital suffering from an illness that had kept him bedridden for three years. He had been diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone at the age of 12 and his left foot was amputated just below the knee. He’d just been told that he’d lose his right foot, too. It was in these circumstances that he composed ‘Invictus’, the poem that ends with the following verse: It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. Those are words to live by — and, indeed, Nelson Mandela did just that.

As readers of this column will know, I’ve spent the last year leading the efforts of a 250-strong group of local parents to start a new state secondary school in west London. One of the toughest things about this crusade is constantly having to bite my tongue. As a journalist, I used to delight in being able to say whatever I pleased and to hell with the consequences. Now I have to be more circumspect. One ill-judged phrase and the whole enterprise could be derailed. I’m often asked what sort of school we’re trying to set up and the answer I want to give — but am reluctant to because it could harm our cause — is the Eton of the state sector.

I watched Shadowlands again the other day, Richard Attenborough’s film about C.S. Lewis’s relationship with Joy Gresham, and was struck by one scene in particular. Anthony Hopkins is sitting beside the hospital bed of Debra Winger when suddenly she takes a turn for the worse. He leaps from his chair and runs out into the corridor. ‘Nurse, Nurse!’ he cries and almost instantly a nurse comes running and darts into his wife’s room. Shortly afterwards, a doctor appears and he updates Hopkins on Winger’s condition in a tactful, solicitous manner. For any middle-class person who’s spent time in a hospital recently, this seems laughably out of date.

The decision of Britain’s most notorious anonymous sex blogger to reveal her identify came as a great relief. It finally puts paid to the suspicion that Belle de Jour c’est moi. The first time my name was linked with the site was in a Mail on Sunday article in 2004 entitled: ‘Who does Belle the Blogger think she’s kidding?’ My wife didn’t read the article, but heard about it from a friend and immediately got the wrong end of the stick. ‘I gather some prostitute with an anonymous blog has outed you as one of her clients in the Mail on Sunday,’ she said. ‘No, no, they think I’m the author of the blog.’ ‘You? I don’t understand. Why would anyone pay to have sex with you?

I was slightly alarmed by the news that Harrow Council is recruiting 2,000 residents to join a network of ‘Neighbourhood Champions’. Their job will be to keep an eye out for evidence of graffiti, fly-tipping, littering and excessive noise, posting tip-offs on an anonymous website. What if the scheme is successful and other councils follow suit? Are we to become a nation of curtain-twitchers? The reason I’m concerned is that I know from my own case how easy it is to fall into this role. I have already become a kind of self-appointed policeman in my local area and heaven help my neighbours if I’m given any sort of official recognition.

I’m writing this having just flown back from Jamaica on the red eye (no pun intended). I feel a little shell-shocked, but not because I was up all night trying to stop my two-year-old son from running up and down the aisle screaming ‘Bollocks’. Rather, it’s because my wife and I spent our last evening at a resort called Hedonism II. I had wanted to go to this place ever since stumbling across a brochure on our first day. As far as I could tell from flicking through its pages, Hedonism II is essentially a nudist resort populated entirely by supermodels.

Americans taking offence on behalf of poor ‘victimised’ foreigners is offensive — to me Oh dear. I may have to write a book called How to Lose More Friends and Alienate More People. In a recent episode of Top Chef, the American cooking show I appear on, I complained about the other judges’ insistence on pronouncing ‘paella’ as ‘py-ay-a’. ‘You don’t say “Bar-the-lona” or “Me-hi-co”,’ I pointed out. ‘So why say ‘py-ay-a’?’ I thought this was fairly uncontroversial, but it was as if I had just produced a white hood and a burning cross.

As luck would have it, the opening gala of the London Film Festival usually coincides with my birthday, and this year was no exception. My wife and I put on our best evening clothes and set off on what promised to be a great night out: a movie premiere at the Odeon Leicester Square followed by a party at the Saatchi Gallery. This year, the film was Fantastic Mr Fox, Wes Anderson’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s story. This is a firm favourite in our household, mainly because it is so gloriously ‘off message’ compared to 99 per cent of contemporary children’s literature. Instead of the usual homilies about inclusion and tolerance, it is a celebration of criminality.

For the past three months I have been reviewing films for the Times and it has been quite an eye-opener. Before embarking on the job, I subscribed to the general view that cinema is not what it used to be. With the exception of a brief renaissance in the early 1970s, the art form has been in a state of decline since its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. But I had no idea just how bad things had become. Take The Spell, for instance. This low-budget British horror film, released a couple of weeks ago, was so bad that the critics started pouring out of the preview theatre within the first five minutes. By the end, there were only three people left.

Don’t be misled by their Bullingdon days: Boris and Dave are masters of re-invention Last night, More4 broadcast a 90-minute drama-doc called When Boris Met Dave that I helped to make. It documents their Eton and Oxford years and I hope they saw it — or, at least, recorded it on Sky Plus — because the impression given in the press is that it was a spiteful hatchet job designed to cause them maximum discomfort. In fact, it was nothing of the kind. On the contrary, when we handed the film in to Channel 4 I was worried they’d think it was a Party Political Broadcast on behalf of the Conservative party. The film was actually a fairly straightforward attempt to find out a bit more about the two most prominent Conservative politicians of our era.

I used to take abuse in print and dish it out, but now I’ve become more squeamish A few weeks ago I appeared on the Today programme opposite David Denby, the veteran American film critic. He is the author of a book called Snark in which he takes issue with the nasty, personal tone that characterises a lot of contemporary political discourse, and I had been wheeled out to defend the hacks and bloggers who trade in this tittle-tattle. I cannot complain about being cast in this role, not least because I wrote a very snarky review of Denby’s book for the Wall Street Journal, but I am beginning to think he may have a point. My change of heart occurred when I opened the Guardian on 27 August.

America’s superpower status is the flip side of its massive inferiority complex ‘You’re bringing a book?’ That was the reaction of Tom Colicchio, one of my fellow judges on an American reality show, when I clambered into the limousine taking us to the Emmys last Sunday. The programme in question, Top Chef, had been nominated for six of these awards and I had been flown to Los Angeles in case we won. My reason for taking a book is that I didn’t think I could muster enough interest in the ceremony to stave off boredom for its three-hour running time. In fact, the telecast turned out to be quite entertaining, mainly because the people presenting the awards kept making jokes about how awful it was. Is that a paradox?

I have often toyed with the idea of writing a book called What They Don’t Teach You at the Elephant and Castle Journalism School. Under such headings as ‘How to Fiddle Your Expenses’, it would contain the kind of information that is usually only available in the saloon bar of the White Swan, the legendary Daily Mirror pub known as the Stab in the Back. A whole chapter of the book would be devoted to the ticklish subject of how to extract fees from people who expect you to contribute your services for nothing. If you’re a relatively successful journalist, scarcely a day passes without you being asked to appear on the radio, or be on a panel, or give a ‘talk’.

What’s true of Hollywood is also true of fashion: no one knows anything As an ink-stained wretch living in New York in the Nineties, I was a little chippy about Anna Wintour. There I was, eking out a living as a general dogsbody at Vanity Fair, while she sat atop her throne as the editor of Vogue. I would often cross paths with her in the lobby of the Condé Nast building, scuttling along with my rucksack, while she glided past in her sunglasses. I was told that she didn’t like sharing the lift with anyone and if you ever found yourself standing beside her when one arrived, you were supposed to wait for the next one. I fantasised about barging past the queue of waiting sycophants, squeezing into the lift with her, and then pulling out a Big Mac.

With four children under six, flying anywhere for the annual summer holiday has become prohibitively expensive, so for the past five years we’ve been going to Cornwall. With four children under six, flying anywhere for the annual summer holiday has become prohibitively expensive, so for the past five years we’ve been going to Cornwall. The upshot is that I am now an expert when it comes to renting holiday cottages. I have rented big ones, small ones, cheap ones and expensive ones, and I’ve come to the following conclusion: wherever possible, go gay. I don’t mean that the owners of the cottage should be gay, though that probably helps. I mean the cottage should cater to homosexual couples.

For years I have been competing with my brother-in-law. He is married to my wife’s sister and each summer the four of us spend a week in Cornwall, along with all our children. For Johnny and me, this is a period of mutual accounting in which we forensically examine each other’s achievements over the last 12 months. Who’s earned more? Who’s advanced further up the career ladder? Who’s put on more weight? Not everyone’s idea of a relaxing holiday, perhaps, but if you’re an intensively competitive sort of person — as we both are — it’s quite fun. Or it used to be. Six months ago, Johnny’s medium-sized technology company, where he has laboured for eight years, was bought by a large American competitor.

One of the most remarkable things in Quentin Tarantino’s remarkable career is that he doesn’t appear to realise just how bad his most recent films are. ‘I have sibling rivalry with Orson Welles,’ he said recently on CBS Sunday Morning. ‘I don’t think he’s that good... all right? I have sibling rivalry with him and Stanley Kubrick.’ I can understand him saying this after picking up the Palme d’Or for Pulp Fiction in 1994, but does he really think that Inglourious Basterds, his latest offering about a group of irregulars operating behind enemy lines during World War Two, is up there with Citizen Kane? As someone who has sat through the film — all 153 minutes of it — I find this incomprehensible.

I have decided not to run as an independent at the next election. As readers of this column may know, I want to set up a grammar school in Acton and my plan was to run on this issue. However, most of my supporters would be people who would otherwise vote Conservative, thereby making it more likely that the Labour candidate would win. This is particularly true of my constituency, which is a three-way marginal. That seems downright crazy, particularly as the Conservative party’s education policy has so much going for it. The Tories may not be in favour of creating any new grammar schools, but they seem genuinely committed to making it easier for people like me to start ‘free schools’ — the so-called Swedish model.