Lunch with the FT: Toby Young

Chris Cook:

Toby Young is not nervous about publicity. I first met him at last year's Conservative party conference in Birmingham. The journalist and author approached me in a bar, pretended to punch me in the stomach several times, then looked up and asked: "Why haven't you written about my school yet?"

Young, 47, is chairman of the governors at the West London Free School, a new secondary school in Hammersmith, which will welcome its first pupils (120 children aged 11) next month. It is a high-profile project that has made Young a regular participant in debates about education in Britain.

The school is one of the first wave of "free schools", funded by the state but founded by private groups such as churches or community groups (in Young's case, local parents), intended to bring new providers into the education system.

What makes the West London Free School particularly unusual is the celebrity of its chairman. Young first attracted attention in the early 1990s as the bumptious co-founder and editor of the Modern Review magazine before moving to the US. In New York he worked as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair magazine where he was not a success and fell out with Graydon Carter, its editor, though subsequently Young managed to convert the experience into a successful book, play and film, all called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 3, 2011 4:44 AM
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