The Joke - Part One

The show trial and public execution of journalist Toby Young

Every human life has many aspects… The past of each can be just as easily arranged into the biography of a beloved statement as into that of a criminal.’ Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves.

‘A joke considered amusing by one may be offensive to another.’ Policy on Harassment, Conde Nast, early 90s.

PROLOGUE

1

The writer Toby Young, as the year 2017 ended, was busier than ever before. Having worked since 2009 to set up several free schools in London, this one-time boulevardier journalist, ever trying to gatecrash the party, now found, if anything, too many doors open to him.

Along with his full-time post as Director of the New Schools Network (an educational think tank), he was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Buckingham, and had a place on the Fulbright Commission, the panel awarding scholarships to US or UK academics wishing to study abroad.  He was also a director of the Knowledge Schools Trust, the organisation in charge of the four free schools he’d set up or helped set up since 2011 - two of which had been rated outstanding by Ofsted.

Recently, too, there had come a new appointment, to the Office for Students, an independent regulator of Higher Education in Britain. Young would be one of fifteen non-executive directors serving on the board, on which there would be just three politically right-of-centre committee members, himself one of them.

All that remained was for the government to announce it to the press.

2.

This respectability Young had achieved was relatively new. Most people knew him, if at all, for other things. There was his past-position as one of the founding editors, along with fellow journalists Julie Burchill and Cosmo Landesman, of the Modern Review – “low culture for high-brows” - an iconoclastic and groundbreaking magazine from the 1990s. Determined to treat mass culture seriously (a typical piece was by academic David Runciman, now professor of politics at Oxford, on the footballer Paul Gascoigne – “Wazza Mazza Wiz Gazza?”) – it had been a success. Then Young famously fell out with fellow editor and soulmate Julie Burchill in 1995.  He torched the magazine with a cheery “That’s All Folks” spread across the cover – leaving contributors and colleagues gaping in response – and hightailed it off to New York to a position at Vanity Fair magazine.

3

His time at Vanity Fair was to gain some notoriety too. It was a calamity-strewn period he’d chronicled in his book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2001). The book – a comic litany of victimhood, lost friendships and missed chances – had become a bestseller, subsequently turned into a one-man show performed by Jack Davenport, and then a Hollywood movie starring Simon Pegg and Kirsten Dunst. It was this book, more than anything else, which had turned Young – in presenter Angus Deayton’s phrase – into “everyone’s favourite tosser.”

Afterwards he had gone on with his weekly Spectator column “Status Anxiety”, an amusing weekly postcard from Loserville, about the mishaps of his personal life: dodgy friends, intransigent pets and worry about where he stood in the pecking order of life.  Young, accident-prone, of average height and with average looks to match, was a kind of Everyman, a 90s slacker hurtling into a middle age that many readers could relate to, and the column soon developed a following.

With a faithful audience and opportunities, Young as a writer seemed made. He would follow up How to Lose Friends with The Sound of No Hands Clapping (2006), another light-hearted account of the ups and downs of family life (the first book had ended with his engagement to lawyer Caroline Bondy) and his attempts to crack the screenwriting trade. Whatever you said about him – and Young, with his bumptiousness, got up plenty of noses – you couldn’t fault his work ethic.

4

This capacity for hard work he seemed to have inherited – if apparently little else at this point – from his father Michael Young, Baron of Dartington. Being the Baron’s son was another thing Young was known for.

Michael Young was one of the architects of post-war Britain – he had worked with the Labour government on setting up the Welfare State – and had followed this with a string of public-spirited works. The Open University and Which?  Magazine were both founded by Michael Young, who had also written a string of socially concerned books, with titles like Is Equality a Dream? and The Rise of the Meritocracy (a term he himself had coined).

Baron Young, a kind of secular saint to many, was surely a daunting parent to have, one whose value-system might well be overwhelming, and his son’s life, as he grew up, sometimes seemed a resentful, drawn-out rebellion against him. Young failed all but one GCSE at school – surely an act of deliberate self-sabotage – and a photograph of him as a teenager, flicking an unsmiling V-sign at the photographer, couldn’t make the contrast clearer. All that’s missing, you feel, is a safety-pin through the upper lip.

5

Yet the rebellion was not quite what it appeared. As time went on, Young seemed ambivalent about his father’s value-system, something he could neither shake off nor embrace. He had at one point seemed destined for a career not in journalism but in academia, beginning a later abandoned PhD in Philosophy at Trinity, Cambridge– and both the starting of the doctorate and his ultimate chucking of it seemed telling, part of Young’s eternal wrestle with his similarities to and differences from his altruistic parent. Indeed, the Modern Review, with its academic approach to low culture, was arguably an attempt to resolve them.

6

But there was no mistaking the filial pride he clearly felt. A memorable scene in How to Lose Friends captures Young’s rage when his father visits him in New York and is spoken of dismissively by one of the city’s ten-a-dime glitterati: “I was so furious I couldn’t speak…I realised that none of [his] achievements would mean very much to her. They weren’t particularly ‘sexy’… In her eyes he wasn’t worth bothering with, this white-haired old man in his threadbare jacket. All he had done was change people’s lives.”

Indeed, as Young wearies of New York, it’s his father who seems to brood over the last chapters of the book, with his paternal advice that Young should learn to distinguish between flashy works that achieve success in the here and now, and those which cut deeper and have a lasting effect on the world. Clearly the thought resonated accusingly with him, but what path would he take? As the journalist Lynn Barber put it a few years later: “At 42 he’s still writing juvenilia… If he is going to turn into an homme serieux he’d better get cracking.” His books and Spectator column, enjoyable though they were, probably belonged to the first category Young’s father had spelt out.  

7

Fate intervened in the shape of his children, and the lack of a good nearby school for them to study at. Young, faced with having to move out of London altogether to get them educated, decided instead to set up one of his own. The West London Free School, the first of four affiliated schools, opened its doors in 2011 and is still, along with the three original affiliated schools, going strong.

It was, essentially, Young’s dream school. Half the size of a comprehensive, it offered compulsory Latin up to the age of 14, music classes, drama, competitive sport and twelve academic GCSEs. It has interdisciplinary topics such as Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, and lectures of politics and philosophy. The school motto is “Sapere Aude” – “Dare to Know.”

Young recognised his late father’s contribution to the enterprise: “Because my father was able to set up all those institutions, I’m confident it’s possible to take on a project of this size and succeed. Without such a role model in their lives, most people would think it’s complete pie-in-the-sky.”

8

There is no doubting Young’s obsession with education – indeed, he seemed to have caught it as a kind of fever. Many children may have gained from his new hobby-horse, but the loss was to his weekly readers at the Spectator. Where was the accidental killer of his children’s hamsters, the Groucho Club schlemiel, the schmuck slighted by friend and foe alike? He seemed to have turned into the kind of man who spoke earnestly from podiums and published blue-spined editions in Pelican about how to improve the world – which Young was now doing. In 2011, he published How to Set Up a Free School, and three years later he followed it with What Every Parent Needs to Know: How to Help Your Child Get the Most Out of Primary School (co-written with Miranda Thomas).

These may have been the kind of books his father wrote, but there was one glaring difference between them. While Young senior was emphatically a man of the Left (only the degree varied), his son had come out publicly as a Conservative in 2010 (indeed, his free schools had been founded on the back of the Coalition Government’s “Academies Act”, introduced by Tory minister Michael Gove in 2010). Young presented his embrace of the Right as more a realisation he could no longer fend off than a conscious choice. Friends of his were unsurprised, he said – they’d always assumed he was one anyway – but people who knew his father took it very differently. “There’s a suggestion,” wrote Young, that by coming out I haven’t embarrassed myself. I’ve brought shame on my family.”

It was clearly a liberating moment for him but, like the Free Schools – which had many political opponents – it made Young numerous enemies. Quite how many, and how vehement, would remain a matter of conjecture – at least for now.

9

But as the year 2017 ended, Young had plenty to be pleased about. He had been married to the same woman for nearly 20 years, and his four children - and four schools – seemed to be thriving. He was financially secure, or as secure as most people could hope to be, and had finally achieved some measure of social acceptance. “Last year,” he wrote in 2018, “I must have attended at least a dozen carol services, and did a reading at most of them. I spoke at Christmas parties, gave after-dinner speeches and opened fairs.”

Now there was his new government appointment to the Office for Students, a fresh challenge and surely another sign he was moving in the right direction.

At just past midnight on 1^st January 2018, the government announced Young’s appointment to the press.

A few minutes later, his Twitter account exploded. Soon afterwards, his career did too.

Toby Young, by his own later admission, was about to have the worst year of his life.