Toby Young

I feel a twinge of pity for Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — and it’s not often you can say that about a billionaire Saudi businessman. According to Forbes, he’s worth $20 billion, making him the 26th richest man in the world. But is he? The prince has disputed this estimate of his net worth, claiming the true figure is $29.6 billion. That would place him in the world’s top ten. The reason I feel sorry for him is not because his wealth may have been underestimated, obviously. Rather, it’s because Forbes has made him the subject of a pitiless hatchet job in the current issue, ridiculing him for trying to persuade the magazine to rank him higher in its annual list of the world’s richest people.

Not a day passes in which I don’t regret firing Irena. She was my ‘daily’ from 1991 to 2004. I don’t think I could have asked for anyone better qualified. Until she came to work for me she had been a professor of geology at a Russian university, but she lost her job when the Soviet Union collapsed and became an economic migrant. In spite of this setback, she never displayed any bitterness. On the contrary, she was remarkably stoical — something to do with the Russian soul, no doubt. Her only shortcoming was that she never called me by my correct name. She’d misheard me when I first introduced myself and after I’d let it go for a few weeks I became too embarrassed to correct her.

I can’t quite believe the number of professional historians who have denounced Michael Gove’s new history curriculum. Richard Evans, for instance, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Scarcely a day passes without him launching an attack on the Education Secretary. He has denounced the new curriculum as ‘a mindless regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era’. What he objects to is not just the facts that children will be expected to learn, but the manner in which they’ll be taught. He believes that children should spend their time learning ‘analytical skills’ rather than mere facts. Asking them to memorise facts is ‘rote learning’ and only suitable for creating Mastermind contestants.

One of my reasons for coming to Kenya was to visit Tango Maus, the farm of Spectator ‘Wild life’ columnist Aidan Hartley. I’ve read so much about this mystical place —the skirmishes with the local elephant population, the troublesome livestock, the Gunga Din-like farm manager — that I was dying to see it. And having spent last weekend there, I’m happy to say it doesn’t disappoint. First, there’s the drive. When Aidan describes the farm as ‘remote’ he’s not exaggerating. I don’t think I’ve ever travelled through more inhospitable terrain. The last part was the worst — a 100-mile crawl along a track that’s so threadbare it frequently disappears altogether.

I was at a petrol station in Nakuru, a city in Kenya’s Rift Valley, when I experienced my first moment of genuine terror since arriving in Africa. I was standing in a queue, waiting to pay, when a crowd of about 500 locals suddenly invaded the garage forecourt. They were campaigning for one of the candidates in Kenya’s forthcoming election — a mob, in other words, and not a very friendly one at that. Some of them were clutching makeshift weapons — clubs, sticks and whatnot — and I looked on in horror as a breakaway group surrounded my Toyota Land Cruiser and started rocking it from side to side. My wife was sitting in the passenger seat and my four children were in the back.

I’m currently in Kenya with my wife and four children and have just returned from the coast where we spent four nights at the Serena Hotel in Mombasa. My only complaint is that all the DVDs in the Kids’ Club were pirate copies — a bit off, considering the hotel is owned by the Aga Khan. Every morning I was approached by an employee of the hotel’s aquatic centre who asked if I wanted to go deep-sea fishing. I said no because the cost of renting the boat was £220, but on the last day he told me that someone else was interested and willing to stump up half the money. It was too good an opportunity to miss, particularly as there’d be room on the boat for my three boys.

One of the things we’ll have to say goodbye to in 2013, if the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has its way, is Asperger’s Syndrome. In the forthcoming fifth edition of the APA’s reference work, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), Asperger’s has been ‘declassified’, that is, it’s no longer recognised as a discrete, stand-alone condition. This is a bit of a blow to me because I’ve been gradually working my way up to getting a professional diagnosis. Am I suffering from it or not? Now, it seems, I’ll never know.

By the time you’re reading this, David Cameron will probably have made up his mind about how to respond to the Leveson report. For members of my trade, it will be the defining moment of his premiership. I’m not all that optimistic. I bumped into a Conservative whip last week who said he thought it would be difficult for the PM to ignore Leveson if he recommends statutory regulation, however much he’d like to. He trotted out the familiar line that Cameron will be under enormous political pressure to implement Leveson’s proposals, both from the Lib Dems and some of his own backbenchers.

For those of us who write for the tabloids, there’s something almost poetic about the crisis currently engulfing our more respectable rivals. Ever since the Guardian ‘exposed’ the News of the World for deleting Milly Dowler’s voicemails — a story that turned out to be wrong — we have had to endure the moral censure of the establishment. That is, senior politicians, judges, A-list celebrities and those members of our own profession who describe themselves as ‘serious’, which is code for Oxbridge-educated and liberal. There’s no great mystery as to why they look down on muckraking journalists with such disdain.

My friend Cosmo Landesman and I recently thought of an idea for a toilet book over lunch. Called ‘You Know You’re Getting Old When…’, it would be a compendium of all those moments when you suddenly get a whiff of mortality. By the end of the meal, the table was littered with paper napkins, all covered in our spidery scrawl. For instance, under the heading ‘Men and their bodies’, we came up with the following: ‘You know you’re getting old when… you let out an involuntary fart when you bend over.’ Not funny? OK, try this. Under ‘Around the house’: ‘You know you’re getting old when… you’re yelling at the radio. But the radio isn’t on.’ OK, OK. Last one, I promise.

There was quite an important news story buried beneath all the post-match analysis from the party conferences. Apparently there really is life after death. Perhaps the reason this ‘news’ didn’t receive more coverage is because it’s not based on any startling new evidence. Rather, the claim has been made by a man called Eben Alexander who had one of those near-death experiences that cannot be explained by science. What’s startling about this particular experience is that Dr Eben Alexander III, to give him his full name, is a neurosurgeon. Not a scientist, exactly, but a man of science nevertheless.