Toby Young

I am not a particularly religious man, but occasionally something happens that convinces me there really is a God. I was in the Virgin Atlantic departure lounge in Las Vegas, resigned to spending the next nine-and-a-half hours sitting in Economy with my family, when an announcement came over the tannoy: ‘Would Toby Young please come to the front desk.’ I’d been upgraded. I would be seated in Upper Class while Caroline and the four children would be in steerage. ‘You are joking?’ said Caroline when I told her the news. ‘What? No, it’s true.’ ‘In that case, I’ll take it and you can sit in Economy with the children.’ I laughed uproariously at this, but it became clear from the look on her face that she wasn’t joking.

Las Vegas is the polar opposite of the nanny state. Which is why it’s under threat My friend Rob Long, an American television producer, once joked that he couldn’t understand the movie Leaving Las Vegas. ‘I just don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Why would anyone want to leave Las Vegas?’ After spending four weeks here, I’m beginning to see what he meant. I was warned before I arrived that staying in Vegas for longer than three days was a mistake, but that hasn’t proved to be the case. Indeed, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve developed a chronic gambling habit, I would quite like to live here. If you are a libertarian conservative, Las Vegas is the heavenly city.

I flatter myself that I’m a Vegas insider, but in fact I’m just a regular sucker I am spending the entire month of May in Las Vegas making an American television programme and I am not having a good time. Before embarking on this trip, I indulged in all sorts of fantasies about what might happen to me in Sin City. Would I be ‘discovered’ by Steve Wynn who would give me the opportunity to reprise my one-man show at the Bellagio? In fact, the most banal and utterly predictable thing has happened: I’ve become addicted to gambling.

‘This is a great metaphor for the death of Vegas,’ I said, indicating the room I was in. The journalist I was with had billed it as an exclusive club where illusionists tried out their latest tricks, but it was more like a support group for unemployed magicians. Most of them were standing behind trestle tables, trying to sell homemade instructional videos of how to perform their ‘patented’ magic tricks. No one was buying. ‘Shshshsh,’ said the journalist. ‘We’re not allowed to use the “d” word. Vegas is supposed to be this fun, exciting place. Everyone’s terrified that if people get wind of the fact that the city’s in trouble they’ll stop coming.’ Alas, it looks as if the word is already out.

As with all road accidents, there was that initial feeling of euphoria — a kind of ecstatic languor. Why is that? Is it to do with losing control? It’s gone almost before you notice it, and then the internal audit begins. I knew I’d hit my head quite hard because I had to struggle to stay conscious. I also saw the drops of blood, falling like raindrops on my shirt and tie. I began to roll something hard and jagged around my tongue — was that a tooth? — but as far as I could tell no bones were broken. Yes, I thought. I’m basically okay. A lucky escape. Now if I can just find my bicycle... Seventeen hours later I emerged from Chelsea & Westminster with 21 stitches in my head, having spent an hour and a half on an operating table.

Next weekend, I am planning to meet up with an old friend in Las Vegas. I have a direct flight booked with Virgin Atlantic, a reservation at the best restaurant in town and, most importantly, two tickets to Crazy Horse Paris at the MGM Grand. But in the past few days I’ve been having second thoughts. The problem is, my friend lives in Mexico City. Just how concerned should I be about catching swine flu? According to my colleague James Delingpole, not remotely. He wrote a piece earlier this week in which he assessed the risk as vanishing-to-zero: ‘I’m not going to die of swine flu, you’re not going to die of swine flu, none of your friends is going to die of swine flu, none of your Mexican pen pals is going to die of swine flu.

State of Play, the Hollywood remake of Paul Abbot’s six-part thriller, is bound to be politely reviewed by my colleagues because it portrays journalists in a sympathetic light. Indeed, Russell Crowe, who plays a fearless reporter, constantly reminds his cost-conscious editor of the vital role performed by journalists in the democratic process. Without us, he points out, there will be no one to hold corrupt politicians to account. As I watched the film in a screening theatre, surrounded by my fellow hacks, I wondered why it is that a Hollywood studio has decided to lavish all these resources on a eulogy to our profession. After all, newspaper reporters are usually portrayed as sleazebags in Hollywood movies.

Armando Iannucci’s satirical movie about New Labour is a tribute to the Iron Lady It is the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election victory on 4 May and, not surprisingly, the tributes have already begun to pour in. Most of these are from the usual suspects, but I was pleased to see that Armando Iannucci has joined the ranks of those paying their respects. Not that he meant to, of course. But his latest project — a satirical film about politics called In The Loop — turns out to be an unintentional paean to the Iron Lady. As fans of The Thick of It will know, Iannucci is an astute observer of life in the New Labour bunker.

If April is the cruellest month, it must be because it contains the Easter holidays. At least, it seems that way if you have four young children, expecting to be entertained. I invited my ‘followers’ on Twitter to come up with some suggestions and they weren’t helpful. ‘Why don’t you lend your kids to Nike?’ said one. ‘They’ll get a free trip to Indonesia and learn how to make trainers at the same time.’ ‘Stuff them full of chocolates and then eat them,’ said another. In the end, it was Ludo, my four-year-old son, who came up with the winning idea: a trip to the airport on the Heathrow Express. Now, I know that doesn’t sound promising, but it had a number of things going for it.

As I write, tens of thousands of anti-capitalist protesters are converging on the City of London to demonstrate against the G20 summit. Marching under the banner ‘Jobs, Justice and Climate’, this loose coalition of anarchists, environmentalists and revolutionary socialists aims to bring the capital’s financial centre to a standstill. ‘We hope to control large parts of London,’ says Ian Bone, the founder of Class War. ‘Whether it kicks off depends on numbers. The poll tax riots were all about 50,000 people who wanted a punch-up. This feels like that.

Our reaction to Jade’s death shows that we are ready to elect an Old Etonian as PM What does the death of Jade Goody tell us about the way we live now? For some, the fact that her battle with terminal cancer became such a three-ring media circus will be a cause of despair. Are there no areas of our lives that should be regarded as private? From now on, celebrities will have to add another stage to the five that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said all people go through when dealing with their imminent death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and — a phone call to Max Clifford. I prefer to see it as a cause of hope. For me, the most striking thing about the last few weeks of Jade’s life was the almost universal outpouring of compassion.

I pride myself on being quite a wily old bird, one of those naturally suspicious individuals who is not easily fooled. You have to get up pretty early in the morning... etc, etc. But last week I was stitched up like a kipper and I am £200 poorer as a result. My only excuse is that the fraudster in question was a middle-class housewife. The saga began when my wife and I decided we would like our five-year-old daughter to start having piano lessons. To that end, my wife contacted her friend Kate who runs a small music school in west London to see if she knew of any good second-hand pianos we might buy. Kate told her she could go one better than that: a friend of her sister-in-law’s had a piano she wanted to get rid of.

I can well imagine my children saying to me: ‘This is off the record, Dad’ As a member of the chattering classes, I am riveted by the Julie Myerson story. For those of you who haven’t been following it, Myerson has just published a book called The Lost Child in which she intercuts the story of a Regency watercolourist who died aged 21 with the story of her own wayward son whom she and her husband kicked out of home when he was 17, mainly because he refused to stop smoking cannabis. Almost every Glenda Slagg on Fleet Street has weighed in on the topic, with the majority condemning Myerson. It is not the banishment of her son that they object to, but the fact that she has chosen to recount the story in a non-fiction book.