Toby Young

As a new member of staff at Vanity Fair in 1995, I was given a list of words it was unacceptable to use in the magazine. A few of these reflected the personal idiosyncrasies of the editor — ‘golfer’, for instance — but most were slang terms like ‘flick’, ‘honcho’ and ‘hooker’. The message was clear: you’re in the drawing room now and you should leave the language of the saloon bar behind. Snobbery is always a hallmark of such lists, the supreme example being Alan Ross’s famous essay in Encounter distinguishing between U and Non-U words. However, sometimes this snobbery is hidden beneath the surface and those who draw up such lists — as well as those who pay attention to them — are not aware of it.

I have taken to sleeping with my grandfather’s cavalry sword under the bed I caught a burglar last week. I was standing in my kitchen at 11 o’clock on Saturday morning when a young man suddenly appeared at the bottom of the garden. At first, I didn’t realise he was a burglar. I strolled outside in a spirit of genuine curiosity. What was he doing? ‘I was playing football and I kicked the ball over the fence,’ he said. ‘I thought it had gone in your garden, but it must have gone in the next-door one.’ At first, I believed him. He was young enough to be playing football — mid-to-late twenties — and he apologised for having climbed over my back fence.

One of the paradoxes of social organisations is that the more egalitarian they are on the surface, the more hierarchical they are underneath. Thus, the House of Commons is more class-bound than the House of Lords, the Labour party more rigidly stratified than the Conservatives, and comprehensive schools more cliquey than Eton College. Of nothing is this more true than Twitter. Twitter, as I am sure you know, is the social networking site of the moment. What Facebook was to the autumn of 2007, Twitter is to the spring of 2009. Soon, you will not be able to open a newspaper or switch on the radio without hearing about it. If the zeitgeist was on Mastermind, Twitter would be its special subject. Not all social networking sites purport to be egalitarian.

I had quite a sobering lunch this week. It was with Bill Griffin, the former CEO of Kiss FM and now the strategy director of a big London ad agency. The main topic of conversation was the cultural impact of the recession and Barack Obama’s election. Would brands that are closely associated with the boom era, such as Gucci and Prada, need to reinvent themselves in order to survive? This, in turn, led to a discussion of journalists and which ones are likely to go to the wall over the next 12 months. He took the view that the cynical, hard-bitten, wise-cracking style of many veteran hacks is out of step with the new, sombre mood of the times. ‘Are you saying I need to get a new act?’ ‘You might want to think about tweaking your brand,’ he said.

I welcome Sir Jonathan Porritt’s advice about population control According to Sir Jonathan Porritt, the government’s green guru, couples who have more than two children are being ‘irresponsible’. ‘I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate,’ he says. He recommends contraception and abortion as methods of keeping the population down. If only I had known this before I selfishly and thoughtlessly produced four children. The Optimum Population Trust, a campaign group of which Sir Jonathan is patron, points out that each baby born in Britain will end up burning the carbon equivalent of two-and-a-half acres of ‘old-growth oak woodland’.

An unbiased review of the restaurant owned by my new employer at the Standard It is what is known on Fleet Street as a ‘marmalade dropper’ — a story so surprising that the piece of toast you are eating as you read it falls from your hand. No, I am not talking about the news that a former KGB colonel has bought the London Evening Standard, but about a small detail buried in the fifth or sixth paragraph of that story. Apparently, Alexander Lebedev’s son Evgeny, who has been appointed a director of the Standard, is the owner of a London restaurant. The reason this came as such a shock is that I am an ex-restaurant critic with a column in the Evening Standard. What if I had given his son’s restaurant a bad review?

My heart goes out to the compilers of the 2009 Michelin Guide to Great Britain and Ireland which was published earlier this week. Not since 1929, the first year of the Great Depression, can an edition of the famous red handbook have been looked forward to less. In the current climate, the prospect of going out for an expensive meal is about as appealing as buying a new house. I spent five years working as a food critic and some of my most miserable evenings were spent in Michelin-starred restaurants. A typical experience would begin with being put on hold when I called to make a reservation and end with the arrival of the credit card slip on which the waiter had helpfully left room for a ‘tip’ even though the total included 12.5 per cent service.

How a reality show gave me back my title as least popular person in America When I was asked if I wanted to appear as a judge on Top Chef, an American reality programme, I said ‘yes’ without giving it much thought. The producers assured me it was ‘the highest-rated food reality show on cable’, but that sounded a bit like describing Nuns On the Run as the best cross-dressing comedy about nuns made in the Eighties. Aren’t reality shows ten-a-penny on American television? No doubt my involvement in the programme would go completely unnoticed, just as my appearance on countless British food reality shows has done. (Did anyone see Eating With The Enemy? I didn’t think so.

The recession is not a ‘much-needed reality check’ — it’s a source of great suffering Puritans love disasters. No sooner has some calamity befallen mankind than some hair-shirted scold emerges from his priest hole and starts wagging his finger. The message is always the same: ‘You are being punished for your immoral lifestyle.’ The latest grist to the puritan mill is, of course, the credit crunch. George Monbiot, the Guardian’s very own Oliver Cromwell, has been looking forward to this moment for years. ‘I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises,’ he wrote in 2007. Now that it is upon us, he and his colleagues can hardly contain their glee.

My New Year advice to aspiring journalists: become accountants instead Like many people in the media, I’m bracing myself for an annus horribilis. I have multiple income streams — film, television, radio, books and journalism — and all have been decimated by the Credit Crunch. I’m not exaggerating when I say my earnings will fall by at least 50 per cent in 2009. I got an inkling of just how bad things are when I was offered a column recently by a major Fleet Street newspaper. They wanted me to write 500 words a week on the OpEd page — prime real estate by any measure. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘How much?’ ‘A hundred and fifty a week.’ I almost dropped the phone.

It is the closest I have ever come to dying. It was 22 December 1995 and I had flown to Chicago from New York to spend the weekend with my friend Matias before returning to London for Christmas. The day started well: Matias was having a fancy-dress party and in the course of helping him shop for canapés I fell into conversation with a sexy, mischievous girl who worked in the local delicatessen. Her name tag said ‘Kelly’. Afterwards, I mentioned this girl to Matias — ‘Do you know her?’ — and he urged me to invite her to the party. ‘But won’t it look a bit desperate, going back to the shop with the sole purpose of inviting her?’ I said. ‘Don’t be such a pussy.

‘Daddy, there’s something I want to ask you,’ said Sasha, my five-year-old daughter, as she was eating her supper. ‘Yes darling?’ ‘Is Father Christmas real?’ This is a question that every parent will be asked sooner or later and my friends are divided about how you should respond. Children will eventually learn that the universe is a disenchanted place — no fairies, no flying carpets and no Santa Claus. Should we try and speed that process along or delay it as long as possible? My own view is that, when it comes to Father Christmas, we should do everything in our power to preserve our children’s belief in him. For one thing, invoking this deity is a very effective way to control their behaviour, particularly as Christmas approaches.

In a recession, head for the mall where you can buy seven Crunchies for £1.49 I was awestruck. As a long-term resident of West London, I had been looking forward to my first glimpse of this emporium, but it was even better than I imagined. I simply had no idea shopping centres could be this good. From now on there would be no need to go anywhere else. It was the answer to all my prayers. I am not talking about Westfield, obviously, but the Oaks Shopping Centre in Acton. The new £3 billion retail park in Shepherd’s Bush may boast a branch of Tiffany, but the Oaks has a branch of Netto, the Danish-owned discount chain where you can buy a two-litre bottle of diet cola for 19p.

Classlessness means your five-year-old chanting ‘sheepshaggers’ on the terraces According to Ferdinand Mount, a revolution has taken place in upper-class manners in recent years. Where it was once socially acceptable to be openly snobbish, drawing attention to telltale signs that a person was ‘not quite our class, dear’ or ‘HMG’ (homemade gent), it is now strictly taboo. ‘To remark on someone, for example, saying “pardon” where U-speak would use “sorry” is now unkulturny, crass, out of it,’ he writes in Mind the Gap. ‘And when you hear someone — usually an elderly person living in the country — indulging in such old caste talk, you wince and try to change the subject.

I’m the celebrity who told ITV there was too much Ant and Dec — get me out of here! Earlier this year I made a life-changing decision. I realised after I had made it that it had been simmering away, on the edge of my consciousness, for some months. But at the time it seemed revelatory: one of those epiphanies that the American self-help guru Dr Phil calls a ‘defining moment’. ‘Darling,’ I said to my wife over breakfast, ‘there’s something I need to tell you.’ ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been fired again?’ ‘No, no, nothing like that. I’ve decided that if I get the call-up to appear on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! this year, I’m going to say no.

‘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.