Toby Young

It’s not every day the Queen invites you to tea. Admittedly, I’m not alone in being granted that honour. At the Royal Garden Party I went to last week, I was among several thousand dignitaries craning their necks to get a glimpse of Her Majesty. But it was still a lovely day out — more deeply affecting than I thought it would be. The reason I was invited is because of my ‘service to the community’, which I assume is a reference to the West London Free School. I don’t suppose the Queen herself has been following my progress in the pages of this magazine — though you never know. Rather, my name was one of dozens put forward by the Department for Education in 2012 for ‘service to the community’.

I was staying with my family in Devon last weekend when my son Ludo spotted that the Olympic Torch Relay was due to pass through Dartmouth on Sunday morning. ‘Can we go, Daddy?’ he asked. ‘Please, please, please?’ Dartmouth was only ten minutes from the cottage we were renting, so it seemed churlish to refuse. Caroline and the other children were quite excited by the prospect, too. Even my curiosity was piqued. I envisaged a distinguished Olympian running with the torch, followed by a squad of young hopefuls. A scene from the director’s cut of Chariots of Fire. We arrived in Dartmouth at about 11 a.m., having read on the Torch Relay website that the parade was due to arrive at 11.25 a.m., and took up our positions on the pavement.

When the government announced its new £5 million parenting project last week I thought I should offer to help. I have four children, after all, so know a thing or two about the subject. I sent a message via Twitter to the owner of the Parent Gym, one of the ­organisations involved in the scheme. ‘I’d be happy to donate all my Spectator columns on parenting,’ I said. ‘You could reproduce them as an example of what not to do.’ It was a joke, obviously. Middle-class dads trade anecdotes in the park on Saturday mornings about what crap parents they are, but the fact that they’re in the park with their children — usually playing football or cricket — demonstrates that they’re actually doing a pretty good job.

Hamster-gate continues. Last Saturday, Caroline and I went out to dinner, leaving the children playing with Roxy in the company of a babysitter. I told them to put her back in her cage before they went to bed, making sure that all doors, etc. were securely fastened. In order to make sure they complied, I stressed that the consequence of her escaping would be certain death — just as I had before we lost Roxy Mark I. When we came home at midnight, I checked the cage just to make sure the children had followed my instructions and, to my horror, discovered that the lid to Roxy’s sleeping compartment hadn’t been screwed down properly. Sure enough, the little Houdini had escaped.

I’ve spent most of the past few days tramping the streets of Hammersmith, doing whatever I could to get out the vote. Like most Conservative party members in London, I’m nervous that Boris’s strong showing in the polls might lead to complacency. Ken Livingstone may be a weak candidate in many respects, but he’s a formidable machine politician. Every last drop of effort needed to be expended if Boris was to be sure of re-election. Having said that, I’m cautiously optimistic. Not only will a Boris victory be good news for London and the country — can you imagine the Olympics opening ceremony being presided over by Ken? — it will be good news for my bank balance, too.

As a relative newcomer to the field of education, I’ve only just discovered the online forums of the Times Educational Supplement. Forget the TES, which is to the educational establishment what the Church Times is to the Church of England. The forums are the place to go. It’s like being a fly on the wall in the staffroom of a large inner-city comprehensive after the headteacher has departed. Above stairs, the writers are focused on highfalutin things like policy and research, but below stairs the posters are more concerned with day-to-day matters. I suspect that quite a few of them are English teachers because one of their favourite themes is the misuse of language. To begin with, there’s the fact that their pupils haven’t mastered their mother tongue.

After my recent column about the horrors of travelling with my four children, I got a sweet letter from a 17-year-old called Tara Vivian-Neal recommending the wheeze that her parents came up with to keep her and her brother quiet on long car journeys: audiobooks. ‘Black Ships Before Troy, The Iliad and Tales of William Shakespeare have forever been drummed into my head,’ she wrote. ‘When a story as captivating as King Lear or Macbeth is read aloud you totally immerse yourself and bickering and fighting is ­forgotten.’ Now, I’m not so naive as to think that my children’s attention could be captured by Tales of William Shakespeare.

Listening to the delegates rant and rave at the teaching unions’ annual conferences last weekend, the overwhelming impression was of a group of people who have completely misunderstood the thinking behind Michael Gove’s education reforms. The general consensus was that he is intent on breaking up our state education system to pave the way for mass privatisation. Indeed, some of his critics went further and conjured up some dastardly plot involving Rupert Murdoch, Gove’s former employer. He is at best an unwitting puppet of an evil robber baron, at worst an active collaborator who will be personally enriched thanks to his role as a ‘weapon of mass destruction’ (actual words of an NASUWT delegate). It’s not just the teaching unions who take this view.

One of the drawbacks of having four children is that your friends never invite you to stay. I’d like to believe it’s because they don’t have enough room, but even those friends with large houses are remarkably tight-lipped come holiday time. Actually, that isn’t strictly true. We have been invited to stay by a few of our friends. It’s just that we’ve never been invited to stay by any of them more than once. I know why. It’s because our children are so … how can I put this … rambunctious. Take last weekend, for instance, when some friends invited us to stay in Dorset. They don’t actually own the house in question, but are allowed to stay there by the absentee owner provided they look after his pets, including his prize peacocks.

At what age does it become infra dig to get drunk in public? Some people might say that it’s always unacceptable, no matter how young and student-like you are. But the older you get, the more embarrassing it becomes. Take my own behaviour at James Delingpole’s book party. At the advanced age of 48, I really shouldn’t stay at book launches for more than half an hour. The sensible thing would have been to pop in at 6.30 p.m., drink a single glass of wine, buy a copy of James’s book and then be home in time for supper. Well, I had no problem getting there early. It was the leaving part that proved difficult. James’s book is called Watermelons, the label he gives to people who are green on the outside but red on the inside.

Is George Osborne too much of a toff to lead the Conservative party? On the face of it, the answer’s no, even if he does look like ‘a powdered French aristocrat’ (Charles Moore). Douglas Hurd was ruled out on the grounds that he was a titled ex-public schoolboy, but that was 22 years ago. If David Cameron’s poshness isn’t an electoral handicap, then why should George Gideon Oliver Osborne’s be? But I’m beginning to suspect he’s the wrong sort of toff. On Radio 4 earlier this week, Janan Ganesh made the point that while the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are members of the same class, Cameron is a country mouse and Osborne is a city mouse.

Things haven’t been going particularly well for the Conservatives lately. The bounce we received in the polls from the Prime Minister’s wielding of the veto proved to be short-lived, the fault lines in the coalition are growing and Steve Hilton has left the building. The odds of us winning an outright majority at the next election are lengthening by the day. All I can say is, thank God for Ken Livingstone. He’s the gift that keeps on giving. Following the revelation that he’s funnelled £755,778 through a tax avoidance vehicle over the last three years, the sensible thing would have been for him to write a large cheque to HMRC, particularly in light of his own tireless campaigning against tax avoidance. But no.

Last week, the West London Free School went out with offers to parents who’ve applied for places in September and it’s not an exaggeration to say my phone’s been ringing ever since. The first category of callers are disappointed parents who haven’t been offered places. We had nine applications for every place this year, making us the most popular school in the borough, so there’s no shortage of angry mums. I tell them, truthfully, that there’s nothing I can do. School governors have a certain amount of latitude when it comes to admissions criteria, but once they’ve been finalised it is up to the local bureaucrats to apply them. Either the applicant has met the criteria or he/she hasn’t.

How do you stop children fighting on long car journeys? With three boys aged six and under, not to mention an eight-year-old tomboy, it’s getting to be a serious problem. Every journey seems to end in the vehicular equivalent of a cage fight, in which all four frantically try to undo their seatbelts so they can pile into the mêlée. No quarter asked, no quarter given. The fights are getting so vicious that instead of breaking them up I’m tempted to start filming them on my iPhone. A greatest-hits compilation on YouTube would get a million hits in less than 24 hours. My initial solution was to get a bigger car. I reasoned that the more space I had, the easier it would be to separate them.

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Roxy’s successor As I write this, Roxy, my children’s pet hamster, is spinning happily in her wheel, with nary a care in the world. Unfortunately, it’s not the same Roxy who went missing four weeks ago. That hamster still hasn’t materialised after I foolishly left her cage door open one night. This is Roxy Mark II, no doubt the first of many replacements over the coming year — all named ‘Roxy’ at my children’s insistence. Caroline and I debated whether to get another hamster after the trauma caused by the first one’s disappearance. ‘I feel like I’ve lost a sister,’ said Sasha, my eight-year-old daughter. But the clincher was the cost of the cage — £65 smackeroos!

As the co-founder of the West London Free School, I receive a lot of junk mail from ‘educationalists’ trying to sell me various bric-a-brac, most of it pretty harmless. Occasionally, though, I get something genuinely disturbing. For instance, this week a publisher tried to interest me in the novels of Charles Dickens ‘retold in a sophisticated graphic novel format’. ‘With atmospheric black and white illustrations and simple text this series is ideal for drawing in readers who struggle with the original version,’ he wrote. It’s a truth generally acknowledged in the state education sector that children aged 16 and under cannot cope with the novels of Charles Dickens.