Toby Young

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.

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.