Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety
I’m writing this from the Hay Festival in Wales, which has become an annual pilgrimage for my family and me. The children can be parked in a masterclass on how to draw dragons while I slope off and listen to David Miliband being interviewed by Matthew d’Ancona. Not everyone’s idea of heaven, perhaps, but it beats taking them to the swings in Acton Park.
The festival is being sponsored by the Telegraph this year — it used to be the Guardian — and I was hoping it would have a more conservative flavour. At the very least, a pavilion somewhere in the middle called Right-of-Centre where the Telegraph’s dazzling array of Tory bloggers — Norman Tebbit, Dan Hannan, James Delingpole, Ed West, Damian Thompson — would take on all-comers. But not a bit of it. The festival is as left-wing as it’s always been.
Philippe Sands is on virtually every panel. There’s a daily dissection of the papers led by Julia Hobsbawm, daughter of the world’s last living Marxist historian. George Monbiot is still omnipresent, oozing self-righteousness from every pore and attempting to arrest his fellow panellists for war crimes. And the highlight of the week is a live sex show featuring Roy Hattersley, Polly Toynbee and Johann Hari. Okay, I made that last bit up, but you get the idea. It might as well be sponsored by the Morning Star.
At last year’s festival the coalition was only a month old and various members of the government were swanning about, enjoying the fact that they were no longer regarded as social outcasts by the liberal intelligentsia. This year, the only minister who’s dared to show his face is Ed Vaizey. I bumped into him at the GQ party and he fell upon me like a man in the desert who’s stumbled across a glass of water.
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