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Saturday 22 November 2008

Status anxiety

Me in Who’s Who? Until I see the 2008 edition, I’ll assume it’s a hoax

Toby Young wonders if he really is a someone now

The obvious thing to do was call up A & C Black and check, but as I began to dial I suddenly had a terrible thought. What if the letter was genuine? My query — ‘Is this real or some sort of hoax?’ — might result in immediate disqualification. Presumably, no person worthy of the honour would doubt the veracity of the letter. Consequently, if I asked the question, the editors might think twice about including me.

The safest course was to proceed as if the invitation was real. But what to put in my entry? I knew from experience that such things are fraught with danger. While an undergraduate at Oxford I was invited to appear in a rival work of reference because my father had recently been ennobled. He was only made a life peer, but the frock-coated elves who compile this ‘definitive guide to the British aristocracy’ don’t distinguish between bogus ‘Hons’ like myself and the real thing. I laboured over my entry, hoping to strike just the right note of devil-may-care insouciance. Under ‘recreations’ I put ‘liberal-baiting’.

It wasn’t until the following term when I bumped into a bona fide ‘Hon’ at the Cheese and Wine Appreciation Society that I realised my mistake. ‘I saw your entry,’ he said, referring to the guide in question. ‘I can’t believe you actually bothered to fill out the questionnaire. I always throw them straight in the bin.’

The next day I popped into Blackwell’s and leafed through the latest edition. Sure enough, the only respondents who had fleshed out their entries were the non-hereditaries, with the longest ones belonging to the sons of life peers. My own potted biography occupied four times as much space as the Duke of Devonshire’s.

I immediately wrote to the publishers and asked if I could revise my entry to make it look as though I had never submitted a response in the first place. I received a somewhat formal reply notifying me that I would be sent a proof of my entry before the next edition went to press and if I wanted to amend it, that would be the appropriate time to do so. It duly arrived several months later and I crossed out everything I’d included the previous year.

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