Toby Young

By the time you read this I’ll be 50. A couple of years ago, when President Obama passed this milestone, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph about how much I was dreading it. But now it’s finally happening, I can’t think what all the fuss was about. Turns out it’s a bit like being mugged: more terrifying in the imagination than reality. It’s possible that I’m in denial. According to a study carried out by Warwick University and Dartmouth College, involving more than two million people, turning 50 is a low point. ‘One in five women and one in six men in this country suffer from depression at this time,’ says Dr Andrew McCulloch, the ex-chief executive of the Mental Health Foundation.

I’m still weighing up whether to run for Parliament, but after this week’s reshuffle I’ve concluded I’m in the wrong party. If you’re a middle-aged white male, particularly one who’s been to Oxford, your chances of becoming a Conservative minister are negligible. Unless you’re a pal of George Osborne’s, obviously, in which case it doesn’t matter if you have B-U-L-L-E-R tattooed on your knuckles, you’ll still get promoted. In the Labour party, by contrast, coming from a privileged background actually seems to help. I’m not just talking about the usual suspects, like Lord Longford’s niece Harriet Harman and ex-public schoolboy Ed Balls. I’m thinking of the new shadow education secretary.

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference in Manchester, but it’s Ed Miliband I want to discuss. In particular, his objection to Saturday’s article in the Daily Mail about his father Ralph. I felt a smidgen of sympathy for Ed when I saw the headline (‘The Man Who Hated Britain’) because a similar piece could be written about my father. May be written about him, in fact, if I pursue a career in politics. Like Ralph Miliband, he was a left-wing intellectual and, while he didn’t renounce parliamentary democracy, he was at one point a member of the Communist party. He left in 1936 after the first of Stalin’s show trials.

I should never have agreed to buy Sasha fish for her tenth birthday. But it seemed like such a modest request. It’s not like you’re going to come home one day to find they’ve escaped or starved to death — like certain rodents I can think of. I was also lulled into a false sense of security by Sasha’s promise that she would look after them herself. I wouldn’t have to lift a finger. It wasn’t until we were in the pet shop that I discovered she had something more exotic in mind than a couple of goldfish. She wanted tropical fish. That meant spending £100 on a 50-litre tank, complete with built-in filter and heating element.

For most people, the question of whether to ban the burka is a purely theoretical one. Not for me. As the chairman of a charitable trust that sits above two schools, it’s something I’m obliged to consider. Usually, the heads of the schools fight tooth and nail to preserve their autonomy, claiming that such and such an issue is an ‘operational’ matter and therefore none of my beeswax. But in this case, they’re happy to kick the decision upstairs. It’s not a matter for me alone, but for the trust’s board of directors, of which I’m only one. And I can’t predict how the board will vote. Nevertheless, I will be arguing for a ban. I should begin by saying I’m not in favour of passing a law to ban the burka outright.

I was at a surprise birthday party for a member of the cabinet last week when a Conservative minister spotted me walking past and grabbed my arm. ‘You must do it,’ he said. ‘Do what?’ ‘Become the Conservative candidate in Hammersmith. If all you manage to do is defeat Andy Slaughter and then spend the rest of your life on the backbenches you’ll still have achieved far more than most of us in politics. He’s ghastly, that man, -ghastly.’ This has been a common reaction to my disclosure in The Spectator that I’m thinking of embarking on a political career. Slaughter may have a majority of 3,549 but he’s far from universally loved.

The Hammersmith Conservative Association will shortly be looking for a candidate to run against the sitting Labour MP in 2015 and I’m thinking of applying. But by God, it’s a tough decision. On the face of it, the case against is pretty overwhelming. The local MP, Andy Slaughter, has a majority of 3,549 and on current projections there will be a swing away from the Tories in London. The Conservatives fielded a strong candidate in 2010 in the form of Shaun Bailey and still couldn’t win it. What hope would I have in 2015 — and that’s assuming I get selected, by no means a foregone conclusion?

An acquaintance of mine called Daisy Christodoulou has just published a book called Seven Myths about Education. It’s a merciless demolition of the received wisdom of the educational establishment, such as the view that there’s no point in asking children to memorise anything, because they can look it up on Google. I’m a huge fan, not least because she combines a conservative attitude towards education with a socially progressive outlook. As I’ve often argued, those two positions are complementary rather than incompatible.

Character is destiny, according to Heraclitus, and that becomes increasingly clear as you get older and chart the ups and downs of your friends. Take the fate of one of my oldest acquaintances, who I’ll call ‘Philip’. Up until his mid-forties, Philip had a pretty spectacular career as a journalist and broadcaster. He won awards, and was invited to speak at international conferences. His personal life was equally successful. He married a beautiful, intelligent woman and had two lovely children. But Philip has a tragic flaw: he’s hopeless with money. In all the time I’ve known him, I don’t think he’s ever paid a tax bill on time.

I’m currently in Cornwall with my family and whenever I spend a lot of time with my children I’m constantly reminded of the opening lines of ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.’ One of the faults my late father passed on to me was an obsession with sports cars. As he cruised along the motorway in his Austin Maxi at a steady 70mph he would point out every fast car that passed us, usually accompanied by a barrage of facts: ‘Ooh look. That’s a Lotus Esprit. I think that’s an S1 — yes, it’s an S1. It has the same four-cylinder engine that was used in the Jensen Healey.

One of the great things about spending the summer holidays in England is that it gives you an opportunity to experience life in the country. All year, Caroline and I dream about moving out of London and spend hours scouring property websites to see what we could buy if we sold our house in Acton. But after a few days in Yorkshire or Suffolk, all our bucolic illusions are shattered. Suddenly, London doesn’t seem so bad after all. We’re currently in Norfolk staying with a friend near Burnham Market — known locally as ‘Burnham Mark-up’ because everything is so overpriced.

Scarcely a day passes, it seems, without another book landing with a thud on my desk that bemoans the rise of inequality. On this side of the Atlantic we have The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Injustice by Daniel Dorling, while in America we have Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality. I’m coming round to the view that these intellectual heavyweights have got it back to front and the really significant social trend of our era is the triumph of equality. So it was refreshing to dip into A Classless Society, the third volume of Alwyn Turner’s history of Britain since the 1970s.

Seeing the royal hack pack in full cry on Monday reminded me of the week I spent with the late James Whitaker, the Daily Mirror’s chief royal correspondent. This was for a profile I was writing about him in a colour supplement in 1993. It was a memorable experience, not least because of the message he left on my answering machine the day the piece came out. ‘I know I said I didn’t care what you wrote, but you could have at least got your fucking facts right,’ he said. He then started listing the facts I’d got wrong: ‘Number one, the Princess of Wales did not call me “the big fat tomato”. It was “the big red tomato”. Number two…’ He was still going strong by the time the tape ran out.

‘Another opening, another show,’ sang five-year-old Charlie on his way to school this morning — and then proceeded to belt out the entire first verse of the famous Cole Porter song. No, it’s not what you’re thinking. All four of my children are deep into rehearsals of Kiss Me Kate, this year’s ‘summer production’ at their primary school, and they’re taking it very seriously. Even more seriously than last year, if that’s possible, when they did Oklahoma! I say Oklahoma! and Kiss Me Kate, but in fact they’re bowdlerised versions, rewritten by the headmaster.

A few years ago, I got the shock of my life when a girl I was sitting next to at a 21st birthday party asked me if I was a dad. ‘Are you asking if I have children?’ I said. ‘No, I’m asking if you’re the father of one of the guests.’ I almost fell off my chair. Until that moment, I had no idea that young people see me as middle-aged. I was 45 at the time so it shouldn’t have come as a shock, but I like to think I’ve inherited my father’s youthful appearance. Indeed, until that moment I was still pitching travel editors with the ‘amusing’ idea of going on an 18-30 holiday and trying to pass as 29.

Caroline and I were watching The Fall in our front room when the intruder entered our house. Not great timing on his part, considering The Fall is a BBC drama series about a serial killer who breaks into people’s homes, then tortures and murders them. Thankfully, we never actually set eyes on him. We only discovered we’d been burgled when we returned to the kitchen to load the dishwasher and found various items missing. But still. Caroline was probably more upset than she would have been if we’d been watching Eat, Pray, Love — which we wouldn’t have been, obviously, because it’s complete drek. I was up most of the night trying to catch the bugger.

An American journalist called David Carr wrote an amusing piece for the New York Times earlier this week about the latest British invasion. To hear him tell it, we’ve captured the commanding heights of the US media, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News and, of course, the New York Times itself, which is run by former BBC director-general Mark Thompson. The latest citadel to fall is The Daily Show, with a Brummie comedian having temporarily taken over presenting duties from Jon Stewart. The article produced mixed feelings in me because I spent the years 1995–2000 trying to ‘take’ Manhattan, all to no avail. For me, America wasn’t the land of opportunity. It was the land of the unreturned phone call.