Toby Young

There’s nothing quite so burdensome as having a book to write. Maybe it’s not so bad when it’s your first book, but after that it’s a terrible chore. The publishing industry doesn’t help by paying authors up front. The temptation to pocket the advance and not deliver the manuscript is overwhelming. Believe me, when Douglas Adams said he liked the whooshing noise that deadlines make as they go by, he was speaking for all of us. I signed up to write a book for Viking, part of the Penguin group, five years ago. Called Fully Comprehensive, it was going to be one part polemic about the shortcomings of Britain’s state schools and one part memoir about my misadventures at a series of sink comprehensives.

It’s scarcely possible to open a newspaper or magazine these days without reading an article about how the latest technological gizmo has rendered traditional education obsolete. According to Justin Webb, a presenter on the Today programme, it’s no longer necessary to commit any facts to memory thanks to the never-ending miracle that is Google. ‘Knowing things is hopelessly 20th-century,’ he wrote in the Radio Times. ‘The reason is that everything you need to know — things you may previously have memorised from books — is (or soon will be) instantly available on a handheld device in your pocket.’ The same view was expressed by Ian Livingstone CBE, one of the pioneers of the UK games industry.

Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I write an article about the number of New York society types who were bankrupt. Not morally bankrupt, but up to their eyeballs in debt. ‘Let’s get a team of researchers to go through the financials of everyone on the guest list of the annual costume ball at the Met,’ I suggested. ‘We could publish a list, like the Forbes 400, but the exact opposite: America’s most indebted billionaires.’ Graydon didn’t go for it, and not just because he was worried about its impact on his social life. ‘Like who?’ he said. I rattled off a list of names, but he pooh-poohed every one. ‘This is just wishful thinking, Toby,’ he said.

It looks as though Hacked Off has finally won its three-year battle for tighter regulation of the press. Why do I say this? Because on Tuesday it published a list of 200 people who agree with them in various national newspapers. These weren’t just the usual suspects — Hugh Grant, Rowan Williams, Richard Curtis. And this isn’t the same list of panjandrums Hacked Off has published in this week's Spectator. No, these were, in Hacked Off’s words, ‘the leading figures in literature, arts, science, academia, human rights and the law’. Not some leading figures, mind you, but the leading figures. So who are these luminaries? One of them is Zoe Margolis, described as an ‘author’.

Shortly after Bob Crow’s death was announced on Tuesday, Nigel Farage sent the following tweet: ‘Sad at the death of Bob Crow. I liked him and he also realised working-class people were having their chances damaged by the EU.’ Cue a predictable storm of Twitter outrage. Farage was attacked for trying to make political capital out of Crow’s death. The following tweet, from the ex-FT journalist Ben Fenton, was typical: ‘Bit off-key for @Nigel_Farage to link a tribute to Bob Crow to his own anti-EU rhetoric, I think.’ Now, some of those criticising Farage had a political axe to grind. They were claiming Farage had broken an unwritten rule that they clearly don’t believe in themselves.

An email popped into my inbox on Tuesday morning urging me to join a ‘fair admissions campaign’ that’s been launched by a couple of mums in Shepherd’s Bush. Their children are at a local primary school and they’re angry that they won’t be able to get them into any of the local faith schools. ‘Two of our children are in Year Five and we feel offended by the fact that out of 11 secondary schools in the borough almost half will put them at the very bottom of the waiting list due to our “wrong” beliefs,’ they write. Now, I’m probably among the dozen or so local residents least likely to join this campaign but, to be fair, I don’t think they singled me out.

Watching Harriet Harman being interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg on Newsnight earlier this week was a strange experience. I felt as if I’d entered a political twilight zone where nothing was quite as it seemed. Was the deputy leader of the Labour party really saying these things? I knew she was, but it seemed so miscalculated — so unwise — it was as if Harman’s body had been taken over by someone else. A mischievous political demon, perhaps. Or Lynton Crosby. The entire interview was like a nine-minute party political broadcast for the Conservative party.

Two new books have been published recently on the thorny issue of social mobility, one optimistic, suggesting various things parents can do to maximise their children’s chances of success, the other pessimistic, concluding that a child’s fate is more or less sealed at birth. Paradoxically, the optimistic book is incredibly depressing, while the pessimistic one is quite reassuring. The first book is The Triple Package by the husband and wife team of Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld. The authors, who are both law professors at Yale, identify three characteristics that America’s most successful cultural groups have in abundance: a superiority complex, insecurity and impulse control.

Michael Gove has been under fire this week for ‘sacking’ Sally Morgan as chair of Ofsted. You’d think he’d be within his rights not to re-appoint her, given that she’s a former aid of Tony Blair’s and her three-year term has come to an end. But no. This has become Exhibit A in the latest case for the prosecution against the Education Secretary, namely, that he’s too partisan, too ideological. He’s abandoned the ‘big tent’ approach that characterised the honeymoon period of the coalition and reverted to type. He’s a Tory Rottweiler. All complete balls, of course. When it comes to education reform, supporters and opponents don’t divide along party lines.

This Saturday night I’ll be staying in to watch the final two episodes of The Bridge, the Scandinavian detective series on BBC4. I missed the first season of The Bridge when it was broadcast on BBC4 in 2012, but have since caught up on all ten episodes, as well as the first eight of season two in the past fortnight. I highly recommend it. The bridge of the title is the one that links Malmö to Copenhagen, and the two central characters, a Swedish detective called Saga and a Danish detective called Martin, flit back and forth between the two cities. It’s hard for English viewers to keep track of which country they’re in because the two languages sound so similar.

Last week, YouGov conducted a poll in which people were asked to judge how middle class the party leaders are. Ed Miliband was the winner, with 45 per cent deeming him ‘middle class’, compared with 39 per cent who thought him ‘upper class’. David Cameron was the clear loser. Only 15 per cent judged him ‘middle class’, against 77 per cent who thought him ‘upper class’. Cue much handwringing in the Conservative party about what the Prime Minister can do to appear less out of touch. I don’t use the terms ‘winner’ and ‘loser’ loosely. Being perceived as upper class in contemporary Britain is the kiss of death, and not just in politics. In the same poll, YouGov asked people the question, ‘What class are you?

I was disappointed to read an article in the Times about a new free school in Hammersmith being proposed by Ian Livingstone, one of the founders of the UK games industry. This isn’t because I’m worried about Livingstone’s school luring pupils away from the West London Free School, also in Hammersmith. I’m all in favour of competition. Rather, it’s because Livingstone’s ideas about education are so wrongheaded. According to the Times, Livingstone believes children should learn through play rather than be subjected to ‘Victorian’ rote learning.

I’ve gone completely overboard with New Year’s Resolutions this year. I’ve sworn off three illicit substances — alcohol, chocolate and ice cream — and vowed to eat an apple every day. I’ve given up alcohol before. The first time was when I was living in New York in the 1990s, though the episode that prompted it happened in Switzerland. I got spectacularly drunk at a nightclub in Verbier and woke up the following morning without my signet ring. This was a family heirloom given to me by my mother so I was understandably distressed. It turned out I’d given it to a young Swedish woman who I’d proposed to the night before. I didn’t drink again until I got married, more than two years later — not to the Swedish woman, obviously.

This is going to be the year I do my Flash Gordon routine and launch a campaign to save the universe from Ming the Merciless. By which I mean some sort of alliance between the Conservatives and Ukip to prevent Miliband becoming the next prime minister. When I first started thinking about this, my conclusion was that any formal pact was out of the question. Not only have Cameron and Farage pooh-poohed it, but the polling evidence suggests that any gains the parties made by not fighting each other would be more than offset by their losses. Some Tory voters would be alienated by a pact, as would plenty of Kippers. However, I now think that’s unduly pessimistic.

When I first suggested to my closest male friends that we have a boys’ Christmas lunch, it didn’t occur to me that this would turn into an annual institution. We saw each other three nights a week as it was, so this was just another excuse to go out and get drunk. But a one-off became a habit, a habit became a ritual, and that ritual now enjoys the same status as all the other little ceremonies that make up Christmas. Today, I would no more think of missing that lunch than I would of resigning from my job as ‘paper elf’ — the person whose job it is to pick up all the discarded wrapping paper on 25 December. The reason it’s become so imbued with meaning is that it’s now the only time I see these friends.

I’ve just had a massive row with Caroline about Christmas cards. We usually send about 120 and this year we’ve each ordered them from a different source — Caroline from the children’s primary in Shepherd’s Bush and me from the West London Free School. Our fight was about which batch to keep. Caroline has sentiment on her side because the cards she wants to send out have been made by our children. It’s essentially a fund-raising ruse whereby the school gets each pupil to ‘design’ a Christmas card, i.e. put a few scribbles down on a piece of paper, then has them printed and sells them to parents at a massive mark-up. (I’ve paid for my cards too, incidentally, but they’re nothing like as expensive.

The think tank Policy Exchange has just published an excellent report on Britain’s urban green spaces called ‘Park Land’. The report’s author, Katherine Drayson, argues that we need to take better care of our parks and public gardens, particularly in the north-east, where local authority expenditure on open spaces has been cut by more than a third in the past two years. ‘Flourishing parks and green spaces are central to the success of our cities,’ argues Drayson. ‘Yet we’ve all gone for a walk in our local park only to find used needles, dog excrement and litter ruining our beautiful green spaces.’ Drayson’s solution is for the government to help set up a website that maps all of Britain’s urban green spaces.

I love The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. On the face of it, they’re a great advertisement for just how broadminded and sophisticated the editors of this magazine are. We’re able to rise above the political fray and generously acknowledge MPs on both sides of the House, regardless of which party they belong to. But at the same time, it’s also a way of drawing attention to the fact that we Tories aren’t as parti pris as our lefty opponents. Unlike us, they’re far too bogged down in the petty bickering of daily politics to pay tribute to their enemies. And in this way we’re able to score a few cheap political points. Having said that, I was slightly taken aback when Tristram Hunt won ‘Newcomer of the Year’.