Table for Two with... Toby Young At Pomona’s with the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

oby Young needs to lose some weight. And before you of leaving a “Lincoln Continental idling at the curb” as he start talking about pots calling kettles fat, let me say trotted through a milk run of Manhattan power parties. But T that this isn't my analysis (I think he looks marvellous, the life soon revealed itself to be shallow and inflected at every really I do) but the judgement of his son, who’s challenged turn with bizarre pomposity.“I remember Graydon [Carter] his old man to lose several kilos before the family depart for bringing his personal architect, Basil, into the office and their summer holiday. That’s why the writer is dressed head- transforming the entire place into a giant cigar lounge” Young to-toe in Nike activewear as he strolls across the sunny tells me. “This was not a sane place." (Carter, for his own part, courtyard at Pomona’s to our table (his ensemble pairs recalls Young’s time at the mag thus: “I basically forgot to fire beautifully with the California-lite intentions of the restaurant, Toby Young every day for two years.”) The book became a actually, not to mention all these Notting Hill au pairs) and bestseller and was turned into a successful Hollywood film why we’re opting today to drink little test tubes of fragrant with Simon Pegg in the lead role. This is victory tooth-picked green detox juice as opposed to anything slightly more, well, from the jaws of defeat, or, as Young calls it, “failing upwards.” journalistic.“I’ve just done an hour of HIIT workout in front (There is some source material to draw on — in his 30-year of a Joe Wix YouTube video” he tells me as he sits down, which career, he has been fired from theObserver, the Daily Telegraph, sounds just about millennial enough to do the trick. the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Mail on Sunday, the There is another way to trim the fat. But, as Young discov- Evening Standard, the Independent and Vanity Fair.) ered, it might come with a few unwanted side effects. At the As he settles into a gorgeous smoked duck and peach salad start of the year, the Spectator columnist was subject to a (an ingenious creation from new Executive Chef Mark Lloyd, social media witch hunt which soon ran amok in the main- it just about sneaks through the pre-holiday diet), I ask Young stream press. After his appointment to the Office for Students, about the decline and fall of Modern Review, the magazine he a pitchfork mob trawled through Young’s Twitter history in co-founded with Julie Burchill in 1991 at the age of 28. Cov- order to unearth some indiscretion ering “low culture for high brows,” it with which to skewer him. Several was a raucous operation both on page "I THINK IT’S PROBABLY risqué tweets, most of them poor and behind the scenes, and became a jokes and tipsy asides dating back BEEN MY BIGGEST well-thumbed blueprint for all cul- some seven years, were dug up and CHALLENGE YET” tural coverage since — when you see thrown across the front pages. Soon, academics eulogise over Love Island the government caved to the hysteria and dismissed Young in the Sunday Times, that’s pure Modern Review. Eventually, from the panel, despite his overwhelming expertise. Young and Burchill clashed in spectacular fashion, and Young Still, in the nine days that the torchlights burned, the decided to torch the publication in a bombastic final issue. writer lost more than half a stone. “It’s fight or flight. Your “Everyone loves a feud” Toby tells me. For a brief period, body’s shedding weight so you can outrun the hoard” he laughs the spat was splattered all over the broadsheet press. “That as we plough into a fresh, almost yoghurty pillow of buratta. was when Matthew Freud [the PR Guru] told me what he tells It was a shock to the system. “There were moments when I all his clients: 'don’t read your press coverage — weigh it.'" thought: I’m glad my father isn’t here to see this.” Young says. “But I don’t think that’s the case anymore.” Young says now, “I did worry that sometimes it would spill over into the real in the light of his own Twitter-mobbing. How does this test world. I took to wearing a deerstalker on the way to work. And compare to his earlier stumbles? “I think it’s probably been I also discovered online shopping during that period” he my biggest challenge yet” he says with genuine feeling. smiles “But I did at least slim down.” But the old game may well be afoot again. “I think I’ll have Young has made a career from this mingling of optimism to turn the experience into something,” Young tells me, im- and self-destruction. His brilliant book, How to Lose Friends agining a play or a novel based on this thoroughly modern and Alienate People, chronicled his disastrous few years as an ordeal. “It seems like such a representative story of the mo- editor at Vanity Fair in New York. For all the gaffes and the ment.” Then he leaves, and I eat a life-affirming chocolate excruciating self-flagellation, surely it was a brilliant time to fondant for one, because I am far beyond the help of Joe Wix. be living out the dream of the Englishman in New York, I ask, Whatever Young does next, it will likely be a huge success as a skillet of plump Madagascan prawns, sat in a sultry gar- — the bigger the drop, the more spectacular the bounce. lic-and-chilli reduction, briefly distracts us both. “It was fun for about a year,” Young says, recalling the thrill every night Lunch for two without wine: about £50, pomonas.co.uk

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