Toby Young

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?

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.