I’m boring, I’m ugly and I can’t write

My new book, Thinly Disguised Autobiography, is not just good. It’s absolutely bloody amazing. The drug scenes make Irvine Welsh look like Mary Poppins; the sex scenes are more realistic than the real thing; it’s the finest dissection of the English class system since Evelyn Waugh; the dialogue rocks; it’s funny and moving, pacy, and lyrical enough when it needs to be but never so purple that you get bogged down in descriptions of trees or furniture; it’s at least as wittily post-modern as Dave Eggers but without the cloying sentimentality; the squalid bits outfoul Martin Amis; it’s better edited than The Corrections; and the ending, when with sorrow you reach it, turns out to be so blindingly brilliant that you go, ‘Bugger me. That was a brilliant ending. I think I might just have to read James Delingpole’s thinly disguised autobiographical masterpiece all over again. And possibly again after that.’

But obviously I’d never say any of that in print because I’m English and it’s simply not the done thing. Instead, I’m going to take a leaf from the book of one of my more successful friends and colleagues and tell you what an incredibly small penis I have. I have an incredibly small penis. Even smaller, if that’s possible, than Toby Young’s. Actually, I don’t believe for a moment that Toby Young has a small penis. He just doesn’t look the sort. And if you’ve seen him in real life, you’ll know he’s not that ugly either. Bald, baby-faced and not tall, certainly; but scarcely so hideous (I’m imagining I’m a woman here) that you’d need to be blindfolded and paid large sums of money before considering having sex with him.

Yet such is the image Young will insist on foisting on us every time he writes another of those pieces plugging his book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.