Toby Young

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.

I write this having just returned from the BBC, where I spent a hairy six-and-a-half minutes sticking up for Fred the Shred on Newsnight. Or, rather, attacking the Forfeiture Committee’s decision to strip him of his knighthood. My antagonist was Will Hutton, former editor of the Observer and currently the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. Referee: Jeremy Paxman. Hutton’s view, like Ed Miliband’s, is that this is a victory for ‘moral capitalism’. What that boils down to, as far as I can tell, is bankers forgoing their bonuses and, in some cases, being stripped of their honours. To me, it feels more like political opportunism.

Last Sunday, the Observer published a hostile article about the free school being set up in Wandsworth by Katharine Birbalsingh, whom it described as the ‘Tories’ favourite teacher’. As readers may recall, Katharine lost her job as deputy head of the St Michael and All Angels Academy in Camberwell after criticising Labour’s record on education at the 2010 Tory party conference. She’s now embroiled in a bitter fight with the SWP, NUT and Anti-Academies Alliance, all of whom are campaigning against her new free school. In fairness to the author of the piece — Observer policy editor Daniel Boffey — he probably wasn’t aware that he was trafficking in lies put about by the hard left.

On Saturday 7 February my wife and I finally succumbed to the combined pester power of our four children and bought a hamster. They’ve been nagging us for over a year to buy them a pet and this seemed like the least hassle. We opted for a six-week-old ­Syrian with reddish-brown fur and white patches. We decided to call her Roxy on account of her being so pretty. It’s short for Roxana, the Bactrian princess that Alexander the Great fell in love with. I quickly realised that hamsters are a bit like printers, in that you think you’ve got a bargain until you realise what the running costs are. Roxy herself was only £10, but the cage set me back £65 and her food is so expensive that I’d be better off ­taking her to the Savoy Grill every day.

Since turning 48 last October I’ve begun to obsess about getting old. In 21 months I’ll be 50 and by any definition that’s middle aged. For a man, turning 50 is a bit like turning 40 for a woman. It’s an unwelcome milestone. Adjustments have to be made, humiliations prepared for. One form this obsession takes is incessantly monitoring myself for signs of ageing. For instance, there are the multiplying symptoms of early onset Alzheimer’s — or, as I prefer to think of them, ‘senior moments’. Sometimes these are quite endearing, such as when I find myself making two cups of tea even though I’m the only person in the house. But most of the time they’re distressing, like leaving the oven on all night.

One of the most depressing things about being a journalist is that 99 per cent of your work goes unnoticed. You pour your heart and soul into a piece, congratulate yourself on having produced something rather good for once, then wait for the plaudits to start rolling in. Six months later, you’re still waiting. It’s like dropping a stone into a well and not even having the satisfaction of hearing it go plop. Except it’s not a stone — it’s your whole career. Occasionally, though, something you write attracts attention, and it’s often completely random. For instance, I wrote a column for this magazine last year that is still the subject of intense debate ten months later.