Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Announcing a change to Toby Young’s Spectator column

A few years ago, we had a bit of a problem with Toby Young’s column – one that never quite went away. He started writing for us regularly shortly after he’d written a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about his complete failure to make it big in New York. His column was called Status Anxiety and the idea was to showcase his self-deprecating humour, while exposing the pieties of those who take themselves and high society too seriously. From the offset, readers loved it.

But in the last few years, Toby’s life has taken a different turn. He dedicated himself to setting up new schools for disadvantaged children, schools that he’d be happy sending his own kids to. He set up the West London Free School and co-founded three others, schools big enough to help 2,000 pupils. And this was no bourgeois bubble: a fifth of the pupils would qualify for free school meals.

Toby had found a new direction for his energies. His column all of a sudden started being about the nature of poverty and the shape of opportunity, educational theories and the challenges that confront those who want to change the system. There came a point, about five years ago, when each of his columns was about education in Kenya, where he had gone on some schools enterprise. I sent him a polite email asking if he’d lay off education a bit and lighten up in general.

It wasn’t that Toby’s column went off the boil – it was always fascinating, original, refreshing and funny. But it wasn’t quite consistent with the original “Status Anxiety” billing. In fact, those words seemed to be written for another character. Toby had once been a boulevardier, and his book about failed social climbing was such a success that it was made into a Hollywood film featuring Gillian Anderson, Megan Fox and Jeff Bridges.

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