Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
Curious choice of words Gordon Brown used to describe himself when firing the starting gun for the general election. ‘I come from an ordinary middle-class family,’ he said. Until recently, ‘ordinary’ was used by Labour politicians as a euphemism for ‘working class’ and was often a way of differentiating themselves from their Conservative opponents who
When you’ve got as many young children as I have, the prospect of going on holiday anywhere isn’t very appealing. It’s not being somewhere else that’s the problem, though there’s a risk that their sleep patterns will be disrupted. Rather, it’s getting to wherever it is you’re going. How do you keep four children under
Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, Gordon Brown’s government has finally done something worth celebrating. Britain is launching an executive space agency that will take control of the money spent on space by the different government departments and science funding bodies. It is a belated response to the surprising success of
I was slightly sceptical of Team Cameron’s decision to unveil their ‘secret weapon’ last Sunday — namely, Dave’s wife Samantha. Not that she isn’t luminously beautiful. And her ability to juggle motherhood with a high-flying career will undoubtedly appeal to many professional women. Rather, it’s her social provenance that concerned me. Wouldn’t her transparently upper-class
My son Ludo will be celebrating his fifth birthday this weekend with a party at the Build-a-Bear workshop in Westfield. Those of you who don’t have a small child will be blissfully ignorant of this new fad. Build-a-Bear Workshop is a toyshop-cum-factory in which children can construct their very own teddy bears from scratch. The
It’s become an annual tradition, like the first cuckoo of spring. At the beginning of March, when state secondary schools send out acceptance or rejection letters to anxious parents, a New Labour stooge pops up to point out that the majority of parents managed to get their child into their first choice of school. This
Earlier this week I was seriously tempted to call the National Bullying Helpline. Ever since I wrote a blog for the Daily Telegraph questioning whether Alexander McQueen really was a ‘genius’, I’ve become a whipping boy on Twitter, the social networking site. The strange thing is, my chief tormentors are fellow journalists. ‘Alexander McQueen: a
Like many authors, I include an email address at the end of my books so readers can get in touch to say how much they enjoyed them. That’s the idea, anyway. In fact, the vast majority of reader emails I get are requests for career advice. Take the following, which I received a couple of
As someone trying to set up a school, I’ve been doing a bit of research into different pedagogic philosophies. What’s the most effective way to teach child-ren, particularly if they’re not that interested to begin with? Should we embrace an old-fashioned approach, with masters standing in front of blackboards reciting Latin verbs? Or a ‘personalised
A few weeks ago my friend James and his wife got a cat. They live in a leafy street in Holland Park, yet they’re so overprotective they refuse to allow Louis out of the house. His wife won’t even leave him alone, insisting they get a ‘babysitter’ if they go out. As the owner of
‘The basic principle of English social life is that everyone thinks he is a gentleman,’ wrote Evelyn Waugh. ‘There is a second principle of almost equal importance: everyone draws the line of demarcation immediately below his own heels.’ That was written 55 years ago and today almost exactly the opposite is true. According to a
Why are local authorities so bad at PR? Don’t they realise they are engaged in a political fight for their lives? The nub of the Tories’ education policy — though they don’t express it like this — is to wrest control of state education away from local authorities. Given that educational provision is the chief responsibility of
As a columnist, I’m often asked whether I deliberately place myself in embarrassing situations for the purpose of furnishing myself with comic material. The answer, regrettably, is no. My life is humiliating enough without me having to court embarrassment. However, when I read that a dating site called beautifulpeople.com had expelled over 5,000 members for
If, like me, you’re convinced you’ll never be truly happy until you’ve shinned up the greasy pole it is easy to forget that not every high-status indicator is desirable. For instance, if I had £100 million my wife’s constant threats to divorce me might actually carry some weight. Then there’s the fate that befell David
I recently received an email from a friend asking if I would contribute to a book he’s editing entitled What Matters Now: prescriptions for a simpler life. ‘A new genre of literature is emerging about the roots of happiness,’ it began. ‘Authors like Alain de Botton, Oliver James and Naomi Klein argue that the materialist/celebrity
Shame has descended on the Young household this Christmas. When my wife picked up our four-year-old from school last week she was intercepted by his teacher who wanted a quiet word. ‘Oh no,’ she thought. ‘What’s Ludo done now?’ In fact, it was more a case of what I’d done — or failed to do.
At the age of 25, the poet and critic William Ernest Henley lay in hospital suffering from an illness that had kept him bedridden for three years. He had been diagnosed with tuberculosis of the bone at the age of 12 and his left foot was amputated just below the knee. He’d just been told
As readers of this column will know, I’ve spent the last year leading the efforts of a 250-strong group of local parents to start a new state secondary school in west London. One of the toughest things about this crusade is constantly having to bite my tongue. As a journalist, I used to delight in
I watched Shadowlands again the other day, Richard Attenborough’s film about C.S. Lewis’s relationship with Joy Gresham, and was struck by one scene in particular. Anthony Hopkins is sitting beside the hospital bed of Debra Winger when suddenly she takes a turn for the worse. He leaps from his chair and runs out into the
The decision of Britain’s most notorious anonymous sex blogger to reveal her identify came as a great relief. It finally puts paid to the suspicion that Belle de Jour c’est moi. The first time my name was linked with the site was in a Mail on Sunday article in 2004 entitled: ‘Who does Belle the