Toby Young

Last Saturday, I was due to attend a garden party being hosted by one of my oldest friends, but I did not have time. After picking up four-year-old Sasha from swimming I had to take her to a party, then pick her up from that party and take her to another, then take three-year-old Ludo to a party, then pick them both up and bring them home. I have no doubt that this pattern — or something like it — was repeated up and down the country. If a Martian landed in Britain on a Saturday afternoon, knowing nothing about us in advance, he would conclude that we live in a world in which children occupy the highest social tier, with adults acting as their indentured servants. And he would be right. This phenomenon is not confined to Britain.

Being muzzled is a very frustrating experience for a journalist. When the story broke last week that Sean Langan had been kidnapped in a remote region of Pakistan — he was released on 21 June after a long and tortuous negotiation — I got a stream of email messages from mutual friends saying, ‘Did you know about this?’ I wanted to respond by saying, ‘Of course I f***ing did.’ For the three months of Sean’s incarceration I had barely been able to think of anything else. On reflection, though, it was a perfectly reasonable question. If I had known about it, why hadn’t I told them? More importantly, why hadn’t I written about it?

My father was a lifelong socialist. He joined the Labour party at the age of 16 and at the time of his death, 70 years later, he was a Labour member of the House of Lords. He was a fairly typical left-winger in that he preferred the company of the poor to the rich and he regarded conspicuous consumption — particularly that of the nouveau riche — as the eighth deadly sin. However, he did have one capitalist vice: he was obsessed with cars. This may explain why during his most politically active phase, when he was plotting the downfall of the ruling class, he drove a Bentley. I was supposed to inherit that Bentley.

If I try to take Manhattan again, I’ll fail completely. Perfect! Well, my wife had the baby. I am now a father of four and, as such, have been doing some thinking about how I am going to support them all in the years to come. My problem is, I do not really have a profession. Or, rather, my chronic inability to shimmy up the greasy pole has become a kind of career in itself. I make my money from being a loser. The trouble with being a professional failure is that my livelihood is dependent on not being able to earn a living. The moment I am perceived to be a success — even if it is just a successful failure — I can no longer plough this furrow. I have chosen a career in which I cannot, by definition, do well. In order to pay the mortgage, I have to remain unemployed.

Did my wife really mean it when she said I didn’t have to be present at the birth? By the time you read this, I will be the proud father of another baby. That is the plan, anyway. My wife has had enough of being pregnant and has booked herself into hospital to be induced. The actual due date is 19 June, but her midwife says it is perfectly acceptable for the baby to come out a week early. When Caroline informed me of this I was a bit put out. ‘But darling,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a lunch date with an important television executive that day. It could take months to reschedule.’ ‘In that case, why don’t you keep it?’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t mind if you’re not there this time.’ ‘Really? Are you sure?

‘See that pot plant?’ said Jeremy Clarkson. ‘I could get a column out of that.’ We were at a supper party in Hay and indulging in that parlour game often played by newspaper columnists whereby we try to outdo each other when it comes to the ingenuity with which we can transform any subject, no matter how threadbare, into a column. At the time, I couldn’t think of anything less promising than a pot plant so I kept quiet, but now I can: a column about another columnist claiming he can get a column out of a pot plant. As a confirmed petrolhead who prides himself on being politically incorrect, I was delighted to be seated next to Clarkson and the fact that we were surrounded by lefties was the icing on the cake.

In order to tell you the following story I’m going to have to make an embarrassing admission: I LexisNexis myself every day. That is to say, I plug my own name into LexisNexis, the online cuttings service, to see if any stories have appeared about me in the past 24 hours. In terms of vanity, it is one up from Googling yourself since it includes sources — like the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary — that are not picked up by Google. However, unlike Google, it is not free. Conducting a search does not cost anything, but if you want to read any of the ‘results’ you have to pay a charge of $1.50/article.

I never thought I’d claim I was quoted ‘out of context’ — until I went to Cannes ‘Memo to writers and others,’ wrote Kingsley Amis. ‘Never make a joke against yourself that some little bastard can turn into a piece of shit and send your way.’ I should have borne this in mind when I was in Cannes last week to promote How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, the forthcoming film of my book. I was at a press conference on the Croisette when a journalist asked how I felt about being played by Simon Pegg. For those of you who don’t know, Simon is a gifted comic actor whose last two films — Hot Fuzz and Run Fat Boy Run — have done so well he is now considered the No. 1 box office star in the UK.

My wife and I have ended up as stay-at-home parents — with a part-time child Policy Exchange, the right-wing think tank, has published a report recommending that mothers should receive a universal childcare allowance which they can then use to pay for part-time help or, if they decide to give up work, compensating themselves for loss of earnings. The idea is to make it more affordable for mothers to spend more time with their children. As the husband of a stay-at-home mum, I have my doubts about this. I daresay my children reap the benefit from having a full-time mother — that seems to be the view of child psychologists, at any rate — but it is a disaster for dads.

I managed to crash the Vanity Fair Oscars party – but not Boris’s victory do It was not until I saw Boris making his acceptance speech at City Hall just after midnight that I decided to gatecrash his victory party. I was quite drunk, having just hosted a dinner party, and my wife had long gone to bed. The only two girls remaining were about to share a cab home together, but I implored them to come with me to Millbank Tower where the celebrations were already underway. ‘Are you sure we’ll get in?’ asked one of them as I squeezed into the taxi. ‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘I’m the only journalist in the country to gatecrash the Vanity Fair Oscars party. This’ll be a doddle.

Boris has played me like a violin twice in my life — even appealing to my conscience At the time of writing, the outcome of the London Mayoral election is still unknown, but I am rooting for Boris, obviously. Doubts have been raised about his ability to run a city like London, but he possesses at least one essential attribute of a great leader: he is a fine judge of men. I discovered this in 1985 when we were both undergraduates at Oxford. I was in my second year and, by some miracle, I had managed to secure the editorship of a magazine called Tributary that was modelled on Private Eye. Trib has long been consigned to the dustbin of history, but back then it was one of the better-known of the student publications and Boris decided it would make a good feather in his cap.

Machiavelli’s The Prince is by far the most useful guide to parenting King Lear was right: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have an ungrateful child. For the past fortnight, I have been overseeing the construction of a tree house for my three-year-old son Ludo at the bottom of my garden, but he has yet to show any appreciation. The problem is, I have employed a young man called Edward to actually build it. The fact that I am the ‘project manager’, not to mention paying for the labour and the materials, cuts no ice with Ludo. As far as he is concerned, ‘Eddie’ deserves sole credit. ‘Where Eddie?’ he says the moment he comes back from nursery and then runs out into the garden.

What are the limits of our obligations as members of society? Should we intervene when we witness a violent crime taking place? Do those of us with large families to support get a free pass? Or should we disregard our personal circumstances and simply apply the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would be done by? Most of us like to think we would do the right thing, but few of us know how we would actually react in a situation like this. It is a test none of us wish to take. A couple of months ago, I was watching Newsnight in the sitting-room of my house in Shepherd’s Bush when I heard what sounded like a cry for help just outside the window. I opened the blind and there it was — the ultimate test.

I have finally done it. After two decades of pitching ideas to television executives, one of them has been commissioned. The first episode was broadcast last week and attracted several million viewers. OK, now for the bad news. The person named as the ‘creator’ of the show is someone who I have never met and who, until I saw his name in the credits, I had never heard of. In other words, the idea was bought from someone else. When I pitched it in late 2005 I was told it couldn’t be done because it would cost too much. Needless to say, they have not been in touch since. For the record, I don’t think my proposal was stolen.

I am so strapped for cash that I have been forced to give up my outside office and start working from home. With three children under five, this is far from ideal, but at least there’s a small window in the afternoon when the eldest is at school, the middle one is at nursery and the youngest is asleep. It is during these precious few hours that I have to write my various newspaper columns, juggle the household accounts and work on the novel that is going to secure my family’s future. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, my move coincided with the start of the Easter holidays and the upshot is that my ‘window’ has closed. For the next three weeks, I will no longer be a freelance journalist. I have embarked on a new career as a full-time househusband.

Six months ago I wrote an article in this magazine in which I complained that rising property prices in Shepherd’s Bush had forced me and my wife to move to Acton. I pointed out that the only decent café within walking distance of our new house had closed down, citing this as evidence that there weren’t enough middle-class people in the area to sustain a single decent coffee shop. Acton, I concluded, was the cesspool of west London. This turned out to be a colossal error of judgment — and not just because the editor of the local newsletter reprinted the article in full and sent it to all our new neighbours. Far from being an urban wasteland teeming with knife-wielding hoodies, Acton is a suburban Shangri-La — the Monte Carlo of Metroland.

Well, it finally happened. After 25 years of cycling in London, I had an accident. Bizarrely, it occurred right outside Action Bikes, the shop in Shepherd’s Bush where I bought my bicycle. There is a cycle lane running past the shop, but I wasn’t using it at the time because there was a Mercedes parked in it. The driver opened his door just as I was drawing level and sent me hurtling into space. Luckily, I landed on my left knee rather than my head so I was able to turn round and start hurling abuse. It was only when I realised that the driver was a large black man that I cut my tirade short. He turned out to be incredibly charming. After helping me to my feet, he explained that he, too, was a cyclist and in the normal course of events would have checked his wing mirror.

For the past 200 years or so, Englishmen who aren’t faring too well in the home country have had the option of moving to the States. Thanks to their inferiority complex, our American cousins labour under the illusion that we are more intelligent and better educated than them. You only have to deign to notice them and they are pathetically grateful, something particularly true when it comes to the fairer sex. Men who would not attract a second glance in the nightclubs of Mayfair are treated like movie stars across the Atlantic simply by virtue of having a British accent. Unfortunately, it looks as if the well has run dry. In the current issue of Reason, an influential American monthly, there is a ‘rant’ by journalist Michael C.

‘Few shows of such embarrassing, authorial ineptitude can have hit the London stage since the Blitz.’ That was the verdict of Nicholas de Jongh, the Evening Standard drama critic, on the satirical play about the royal family that Lloyd Evans and I wrote in 2006. It wasn’t the only bad review we got, but it was by far the most damning. According to Jongh, A Right Royal Farce was not just your run-of-the-mill damp squib; it was the worst show to appear in London since 1941. You can imagine my glee, therefore, when I learnt that Jongh had written a play himself. ‘Aha’, I thought. ‘The scourge of London’s theatreland is about to get a taste of his own medicine.

I can’t afford to send my children to private school — and I’m relishing the cachet This morning I received a letter from Norland Place, a much sought-after private school on Holland Park Avenue, informing me that my son Ludo had been awarded a place in September 2009. There was a time when this would have been a cause of rejoicing in our household, but not any more. My wife and I applied to the school a couple of years ago, back when we only had one other child. Now that we have three and are about to have another, taking up the place is unthinkable. Sending two children to private school in London is just about affordable, but four is out of the question. Ludo will have to go to the local state primary, just like Sasha, who started there last September.