Status Anxiety: Sophie Dahl is a saint – leave her alone

17 September 2011

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

Poor Sophie Dahl. After appearing on the Today programme to make an appeal for charitable donations to the Roald Dahl Museum, she has become an object of ridicule.

This was partly prompted by the amount of money she was asking for and the use for which it was intended: £500,000 does seem like rather a lot to fund the relocation of Dahl’s writing shed from the bottom of her grandmother’s garden to the nearby museum in Great Missenden. A couple of years ago I erected a ‘writing shed’ at the bottom of my garden — at least, that’s how I described it to my wife — and the total cost was approximately £12,500. But as Dahl pointed out to the interviewer, moving the shed is quite a process and involves a lot of archivists.

However, the main reason her appeal triggered a tsunami of abuse, particularly from Radio 4 listeners, is that she’s well-spoken, good-looking and reasonably well off. In austerity Britain, when we’re all supposed to be in this together, that’s virtually against the law. Possessing just two of these attributes is bad enough, but all three is intolerable.
If Miss Dahl wants to remove some dilapidated shed from the grounds of her family pile, she should bloody well pay for it herself. Well, knickers to that.

Sophie Dahl is an angel in human form and I won’t hear a word against her. We first met when I was cobbling together the ‘Swinging London’ issue of Vanity Fair in 1996 and, three years later, she moved into my flat in New York. I hoped my male friends would think we were romantically involved, but they soon realised we were just friends and began to circle like buzzards. Whenever I picked up the phone there would be an awkward pause before the person on the other end — usually a close friend — asked to speak to Sophie.

She would often end up talking to them for hours because she couldn’t bring herself to cut them short. I told her she was too sweet-natured for a cut-throat city like New York. Within a week of moving in, it became impossible for her to walk to the end of the street without being mobbed by homeless men. It wasn’t her beauty they were attracted to, but her willingness to dip into her pocket. She’d already acquired a reputation throughout the neighbourhood as an easy mark.

I’ve known many people in my life who’ve been turned into sacred monsters by fame and money, but not Sophie. A few years later, at the height of her modelling success, I had lunch with her on Christmas Eve in my flat in Shepherd’s Bush. Afterwards, we strolled to the nearest Post Office to mail a few last-minute gifts and witnessed an old lady being given short shrift by an officious clerk. She was trying to claim her pension but was in the wrong Post Office, apparently. Thanks to some last-minute bureaucratic change, she needed to go to Harlesden and she clearly hadn’t a clue where that was. Her misery was palpable.

‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ asked Sophie.

The look of wonder on the pensioner’s face as she gazed up at this blond apparition was something to behold. A ray of sunshine had appeared on the darkling plain.

Sophie took her to Harlesden in a taxi, helped her secure her pension, then dropped her back home in Hammersmith. The old lady was so touched she insisted Sophie come in for a slice of cake. Sophie then sat at the kitchen table for over an hour, listening to the pensioner’s life story. It was an act of Christmas charity straight out of Dickens.

I could go on. The bottom line is that Sophie is one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, the exact opposite of the money-grabber she’s been depicted as. If it had been Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss asking for money on the Today programme, I’d be quite prepared to join the lynch mob. I’m as cynical as the next man when it comes to attributing the worst possible motives to celebrities raising money for charity. Indeed, just hearing the word ‘charity’ on their lips makes me think of Smashie and Nicey. But if Sophie says the Roald Dahl Museum needs £500,000 to relocate her grandfather’s writing shed, that’s good enough for me. Where do I send the cheque?

Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.

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Louisa Greenacre

September 16th, 2011 10:34pm Report this comment

Perhaps the archivists have realised they've found an easy mark too.

Capn Flint

September 22nd, 2011 9:33pm Report this comment

Toby, if your wife has you well sussed - as I'm guessing she probably has by now - your chequebook has been accidentally locked in the safe to which she has forgotten to give you the combination.
She may have even forgotten the code by now.

There's a wider point to be made about the tax-free nature of charitable trusts and its effect on fiscal justice, the need for any society to create priorities of charity, and the present-day mawkish secular canonisation of dead writers. But that involves a lot of value judgements, so let's just stick with No Toby, You Are Not Sending Sophie Our Children's Inheritance.

A. Corton

September 22nd, 2011 9:59pm Report this comment

I'm sure you know this already, but let's put it on the record. Even after dedicating your column to her beauty, sweetness, light and charity, you still won't get into her knickers.

It it didn't happen in the early days in New York, it's not gonna happen now.

We men have all been there, hope always triumphing over prior experience, good sense and friends' advice. But then there is always the next stage: no fool like an old fool

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