Toby Young

‘Wow, that’s brave,’ said John Kampfner, the former editor of the New Statesman. ‘I’d never do that.’ I had just told him I’d agreed to be on Have I Got News for You and, as soon as he said this, I began to have second thoughts. ‘Oh Christ. D’you think I’ve made a terrible mistake?’ ‘It depends how quick-witted you are,’ he said. He was right — and the truth is I’m not that quick on my feet. For instance, when I appeared on Question Time in 2005 I had to field one of those dreadful ‘funny’ questions at the end and completely fluffed it. The exchange went like this: Audience member: If the two contenders for the Tory leadership were animals, what animals would they be?

About a year ago, I appeared on Watchdog to discuss identity fraud. A researcher for the programme had managed to become a ‘friend’ of mine via Facebook and, as a result, now had access to personal information that would enable her to impersonate me. For instance, she could apply for a credit card in my name and run up huge debts that I would be liable for. Was I not horrified to discover just how vulnerable I was to this type of crime? ‘Actually, no,’ I said. ‘The thing is, I want people to start going round impersonating me. Having people pretend to be you is a sign that you’ve arrived in our society.’ I was being provocative, obviously.

I am surprised by how ready my journalistic colleagues have been to accept Nat Rothschild’s public explanation of why he behaved as he did. According to him — and his anonymous ‘friends’ quoted in the press — he was furious that George Osborne broke the time-honoured rule whereby guests at upper-class house parties are obliged to respect the privacy of their fellow guests and not talk about anything that was said or done in the press. What happens in Corfu stays in Corfu. While such a rule undoubtedly exists, the usual punishment is simply to cross the offender off your Christmas card list, not to write a letter to the Times.

Be careful what you wish for — or, as the old proverb puts it, if God hates you, he grants your deepest wish. All my life I have wanted to be famous and now that I am finally enjoying my 15 minutes I am not sure it is all it is cracked up to be. I mistakenly thought that becoming a celebrity would be liberating — I would shrug off the everyday constraints of being a repressed, middle-class Englishman and get in touch with my inner egomaniac. In fact, the opposite is true. Since How to Lose Friends & Alienate People became the number one film at the British box office I have had to watch my ps and qs to a far greater extent than before.

I have been reading with interest the articles in the press about the Afghan family that is supposedly living in a £1.2 million council house. You see, the house in question is just round the corner from mine and if it really is worth £1.2 million that means Acton has been unaffected by the credit crunch. On the contrary, if the papers are to be believed, property prices in Acton have actually increased in the past 12 months. As someone who bought an almost identical property in the area last year, that came as an enormous relief. When the story broke, I called Christian Harper, the Oliver Finn estate agent who sold me my house, to see if it was true. Was it possible that the Victorian property in question is worth £1.2 million?

I cannot help feeling a certain affinity with Peter Mandelson. Like me, he has been given a number of high-profile jobs, only to lose them in slightly dubious circumstances. Yet somehow he always manages to bounce back. He is the political equivalent of a Weeble: no matter how near he comes to toppling over, he ends up righting himself. This has led me to formulate the Mandelson/Young Guide to Failing Upwards: 1. Cultivate a reputation for being clever. No matter how often you screw up, if people believe you possess some special talent, they will always consider employing you. In Mandelson’s case, the fact that he is widely thought to possess an almost supernatural ability to win general elections has been key to his political resurrection. 2. Be as obnoxious as possible.

Disciplined, cheerful, humble and truly nice -— Simon Pegg is everything I’m not It is a strange experience interviewing the actor who has just played you in the film of your life. Simon Pegg has been cast as yours truly in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and the first thing he does is remind me that there is a scene in the film in which he makes a complete hash of an interview with a famous actor. That inevitably raises the question: if I mess up this interview, and the makers of the sequel want to include this scene in the film, who will be cast as ‘Simon Pegg’? I may be getting ahead of myself here. It is a little premature to discuss the sequel before the original film has even come out. (It is released on 3 October.

To my astonishment, the tsunami that swept through the global financial markets last week actually affected one of my neighbours. When the credit crunch extends as far as Acton, you know Gordon Brown’s in trouble. It turns out the man in question was an employee of Lehman Brothers. He’d managed to secure a job there after being laid off by Bear Stearns — which must make him one of the unluckiest men in London. When he told me this I immediately suggested he write a piece about this unfortunate coincidence for one of the broadsheets, but he declined on the grounds that it might deter anyone else from employing him.

It was the call I’d been dreading. Roger Cashmore, the Principal of Brasenose College, phoned to ask whether I would be willing to give a speech on behalf of the alumni at the College Gaudy. It was the 25th anniversary of the class that had matriculated in 1983 and I had already RSVPd. How was I going to wriggle out of it? The reason for my reluctance, obviously, is that it would provoke a tidal wave of resentment on the part of my contemporaries. Thinking about the moment when I got up to make the speech, I could already feel the gamma rays of hatred shooting out of their eyes. Who does that c*** think he is? What the f*** has he achieved? He’s just a bloody self-publicist. ‘You’d be doing me a huge favour,’ said Professor Cashmore.

By the time you read this I may be dead. I have been pressganged into taking part in the London Duathlon this Sunday in order to raise money for the Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity. A canny young man who works for the charity noticed a reference to the paediatric unit at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in something I wrote about my son and suggested that this might be a good way to give something back. It was a request I couldn’t refuse. Ludo was born with neonatal varicella, an extremely rare condition that, in certain circumstances, has a 30 per cent mortality rate. Varicella is the Latin word for chicken pox and while that is not normally a life-threatening disease, it can pose problems for newborns because of their undeveloped immune systems.

In the current issue of Empire there is a piece by Bob Weide, the director of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, in which he says that the reason I was banned from the set of the film is because Kirsten Dunst insisted on it. I was not aware of this until now, but I can’t say I’m surprised. On my first visit to the set, I went bounding up to Kirsten and said, ‘So, have you fallen in love with me yet?’ She had been cast as the female lead in the film and what I meant was, ‘Has the character you’re playing fallen in love with the character Simon Pegg is playing who is based on me?’ Unfortunately, she had no idea who I was and, consequently, didn’t know what I was talking about.

I am currently in Cornwall where I am spending the last week of August with my family. I cannot claim to have been basking in sunshine — the weather here is no better than the rest of the country — but I am luxuriating in the warm glow that comes from being on an environmentally friendly holiday. As I make my way towards Fifteen, Jamie Oliver’s restaurant in Watergate Bay, I exchange approving nods with the other dads. I had no idea that saving the planet could produce such a powerful sense of wellbeing. Admittedly, this feeling is quite hard to sustain once I have returned to the car park. I have borrowed a VW Caravelle for the week and while it is diesel-powered and does a respectable number of miles to the gallon, it is the size of a horsebox.

New York’s Eurotrash exude a preening self- regard that makes me sick to my stomach In New York, the big story of the summer is that the Eurotrash are back. Thanks to the weak dollar, rich Europeans have been descending on the city by the jet-load, irritating the locals by referring to ludicrously overpriced luxury goods as ‘bargains’. To add insult to injury, some shops have even put up signs saying, ‘We accept euros.’ The rapper Jay-Z seems to have caught the new mood. In his latest video, he is filmed cruising the streets of New York clutching a fistful of the European banknotes. Among the expat community, the resurgence of the Eurotrash is a source of some irritation.

These days, I can’t even afford to rent a trailer on Shelter Island As a young man living in New York, I used to club together with four or five friends every summer and rent a house on Shelter Island. About 80 miles from New York, it is close enough to the Hamptons to enjoy a certain social cachet, but not so close that it is overrun with Porsche-driving investment bankers. A favourite bumper sticker on the island reads: ‘SLOW DOWN — You’re Not Off-Island Any More.’ I spent an idyllic summer there in 1999 with the woman who would become my wife and we have often dreamt about returning one day with our children. This year, I decided to bite the bullet and began looking into the cost of renting somewhere for two weeks.

At first, I thought the reason the British Consul General in Los Angeles had agreed to have lunch with me was because he knew who I was. Before setting off on my annual pilgrimage to Hollywood, I had emailed Bob Peirce to see if he might be able to squeeze in a quick drink. I was interested in chatting to him about BritWeek, an annual celebration of the Old Country that he inaugurated last year. To my astonishment, he suggested we have lunch at the Four Seasons, the grandest hotel in Beverly Hills. ‘Perhaps he’s read one of my books,’ I thought. It didn’t take long for the scales to fall from my eyes. Shortly after I took my place opposite him at the best table in the restaurant, we were joined by Sarah Cairns, the Four Seasons’ director of PR.

There have been many wise and learned discussions about the impact the internet has had on journalism. However, one area that has been neglected is the impact it has had on the egos of journalists. I don’t mean the bruised feelings that Matt Drudge’s success has caused among the higher echelons of the American intelligentsia. I mean the terrible wounds inflicted on people like me by the ‘comments’ that appear beneath our articles. ‘What a load of self-interested tripe,’ wrote one reader underneath a diary column I wrote in the Daily Telegraph last week. Another expressed himself even more succinctly: ‘Bryony Gordon is away.

Should I have forced myself to accept a diseased prisoner’s licked spoon? Like most Englishman, how well mannered I am depends upon the social status of the person I am interacting with. If he is below me in the pecking order, I am unfailingly polite, bending over backwards to reassure him that I do not think of him as my inferior. If he is above me, by contrast, I am insolent and contemptuous, doing whatever I can to convey that I do not consider him my superior. This code has served me pretty well over the years, but it was tested to breaking point on a recent visit to Westville Prison, one of the most infamous jails in South Africa.

I was told at a very early stage in my writing career never to seek revenge on critics. If you get a poor review, you just have to take it on the chin. To write a letter of complaint to the publication in question — or, worse, punch the critic on the nose — is a terrible faux pas. The correct response when asked about a bad notice is to pretend you have not read it.    But what if the boot is on the other foot? Is it acceptable for critics to write about the efforts that have been made to retaliate against them? Or is that a breach of etiquette, too?