Toby Young

 As I exited the Today programme last week, my phone buzzed, indicating I had just received a text message. Which one of my friends was congratulating me on having just trounced another government minister? According to the LCD screen it was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall! Hugh is an old Oxford contemporary whom I hadn’t heard from in years. What warm words did he have for me this morning? ‘You should have stayed in bed!’ This would not have been so galling if Hugh had not appeared on Desert Island Discs the week before. There is a scale of recognition in British public life — an unofficial honours system — and Desert Island Discs is undoubtedly near the top.

Like most middle-class parents, I feel duty-bound to take my children to the theatre occasionally. Why is this? I tell myself it is a way of broadening their horizons, but really it is all about class. It is the same reason I encourage them to play with wooden toys and eat broccoli and say ‘please’. I want to have nice, middle-class children so people will think I’m a nice, middle-class man. Judging from my trip to see Peter Pan last week with my son and daughter, the whole enterprise is doomed. ‘Will it be in 3D daddy?’ asked six-year-old Sasha as we strolled across Kensington Gardens. ‘Yes, of course it will. This is live theatre, remember? We’re not going to the cinema.’ ‘Will we have to wear those funny glasses?

‘Antichrist’ is the comic masterpiece of a con artist mocking fans of high culture Is Antichrist, the new film from Lars von Trier, a comedy? At first glance, that seems like a ludicrous suggestion. It contains some of the most disturbing images I’ve ever seen in the cinema, including a scene in which Charlotte Gainsbourg performs a clitoridectomy on herself. How could anyone describe such a film as a comedy? Certainly, von Trier has given no hint that Antichrist is intended to be funny. In the production notes he has written a ‘confession’ in which he claims to have produced the script as a form of therapy after a bout of depression. ‘Scenes were added for no reason,’ he says. ‘Images were composed free of logic or dramatic thinking.

My heart goes out to Hardeep Singh Kohli, the turban-wearing comed-ian and writer (and a contributing editor to this magazine). According to a BBC spokeswoman, he has been suspended from The One Show for six months following a complaint by a female colleague. ‘He was reprimanded and immediately apologised,’ she said. ‘He agreed to take some time away from the show to reflect on his behaviour.’ I wonder what appalling act of sexism Kohli committed to upset his co-worker? Asked for her phone number, perhaps? Invited her out to dinner? ‘I recognise I overstepped the mark and have apologised unreservedly,’ he has said. The whole episode is eerily reminiscent of the public shaming of a Chinese intellectual during the Cultural Revolution.

As funny as Bruno undoubtedly is, Baron-Cohen’s film is fundamentally dishonest One of the funniest scenes in Bruno is when Sacha Baron-Cohen, playing the gay Austrian television presenter, appears on a talk show in Texas called The Richard Bey Show. The African-American audience is none too impressed when he tells them he’s looking for a black male partner to help him raise his African baby — and is even more outraged when the baby is brought out wearing a ‘Gayby’ T-shirt. ‘He’s a real dick magnet,’ Bruno explains. The audience is then shown a picture of the child in a hot tub with four other men, two of whom are performing a sex act. ‘You’re going to burn in hell for that one,’ shouts a member of the audience.

‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Father’s Day piece that described a typical Sunday in my life. Essentially, it involved being an indentured slave to my four young children. Several people pointed out that I was guilty of ‘helicopter parenting’ — an American term for supervising your children’s lives too closely — and recommended a book on the subject by Carl Honoré, a Canadian intellectual. I was a bit suspicious because Honoré is one of the leading advocates of the Slow Movement, but Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting is quite convincing.

By my epic standards, this was an extremely polite best man’s speech It never ceases to amaze me that I am still asked to speak in public. If I am not the worst orator of my generation, I must be a close second. The last time I performed an after-dinner speaking gig was in Bath and the organisation concerned was so appalled it asked for its money back. ‘My delegates are not prudes,’ wrote the booker to my agent, ‘but the use of the “C” word in polite company is to me unacceptable and to use it twice was just insult to injury.’ In my defence, both uses of ‘C’ word occurred in the course of telling a single anecdote about encountering Gordon Ramsay on a flight back from Los Angeles.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet. In Iran, the anti-government protesters have been circumventing President Ahmadinejad’s efforts to stop them organising by communicating via Twitter. Not only that, but they have been using the social networking site to file pictures and news reports, documenting the government’s brutal attempt to suppress the protest. If President Ahmadinejad falls and Mousavi is installed in his place, this will surely come to be known as the Twitter Revolution.

For several weeks now I have been agonising about whether to run for Parliament as an independent at the next election. On the one hand, the current political crisis means that an independent has a higher-than-normal chance of being elected. But on the other, it is not clear what an MP who isn’t affiliated with any of the major political parties could achieve. What would be the point? As the father of four young children, the issue I care most about is education. In the constituency of Ealing Central and Acton where I live there are only two outstanding state secondary schools, one C of E, the other Catholic. The nearest secular school to us is Acton High where, according to the latest Ofsted report, only 31 per cent of pupils managed to get five or more GCSEs at grade C or above.

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.