Don't apologise, Toby Young is certainly a contender for that hotly contested title.
But most remarkable about all of his Tina Brown anecdotes is what a good light they put Tina Brown in. Knowing nothing of her, apart from the TV pictures, hanging out with Hillary and Demi Moore, I had formed a low opinion of her. But Young's evidence of her aggressive and demanding editorial style, makes her seem a great deal more impressive.
Young's own editing experience on the Modern Review indicates that a soft touch just gets you nowhere - it certainly alienated his partner, Birchill who ran off with the sub-editor, Charlotte Raven.
Young famously wrote a vile rant against the working classes, to the effect that they were a scrofulous half-breed, diseased, drugged and criminal, a great decline from the nobility of Labour in his father's day. His latest novel is similarly a rosy reflection upon the days when men were men, and served in the army. Young's TV persona is Cockney wide-boy, or what we over here call 'mockney'.
But Young's working class roots are shallow, amounting to a brief spell in the Socialist Workers' Party (UK). His father is of a military background, officer rank. (Over here, the name Toby, is a dead give away, being not far from Tristan, or Archie.). Like many of his generation and class, he has an inferiority complex about the fact that his father's generation fought in wars, but we have no great cause.
Young's cobblers was beautifully exposed during the overwrought D-Day reflections, when he was on the late review with black journalist Darcus Howe. Howe, a veteran of the race war was not getting much of a look in the discussion as Young blathered on - which was a disappointment to those of us who have seen Howe, a great broadcaster, at work before.
Then came the item on some history programme about the Second World War. Young starts going on about how this was a truly heroic struggle and a just war, and that this was militarism that you could be proud of. Howe demurred, gently suggesting that the war was not just about fighting fascism. Young went over the top (metaphorically, of course) calling him a defeatist. Then Howe blasted him: Look at your war from the point of view of the Kenyan Rifles (a black regiment in the British Army), he said. Fighting fascism on behalf of the British Empire in 1945. Within a decade these self-same men were in concentration camps run by the British Empire, to suppress the Mau-Mau uprising. And so it continued - Howe deconstructed the British military machine showing that its principle goal was the suppression of natives, and that those who took on the struggle for liberation from fascism were bitterly betrayed.
Young, knowing that the game was up, hung his head in shame - defeated by someone who knew what he was talking about, and had real feelings not Young's ersatz passion.
Incidentally, I had always hated Birchill like you, but her most recent columns have been very good, especially on the Kosovo war, and rebutting the charge laid against her of being 'the worst mother in the country'.
>He used to write an insanely annoying column
>in the Standard about his life in New York working for Vanity Fair (since
>sacked), which basically consisteed of telling his adoring readers time and
>again how he had once more not been let into the fashionable party of the
>week because the "clipboard Nazi" (somewhat repugnant phrase) "didn't think
>I was famous enough."
...
>It's not like I want to read this magazine or anything. But Toby Young
>really desperately needs to be conscripted into the army or something.
-- Jim heartfield