Just how horrible is Toby Young?

Despite the film of his memoir, 'How to Lose Friends and Alienate People', showing us the supposed wretchedness of his persona, the English journalist Toby Young seems perfectly amiable. Could it all be a ruse?

IT COULD HAVE been so different. The son of the late Michael Young, a distinguished sociologist and life peer, Young has a first-class degree from Oxford and spent some time as a Fulbright scholar at Harvard. Had he not drifted away from his PhD thesis in Cambridge he might now be eking out a meagre (but honest) living teaching philosophy at a red-brick university.

Unhappily for the undergraduates of Manchester or Sheffield, Young allowed himself to be drawn into the murky world of journalism. In 1991, he founded the Modern Review, a little magazine devoted to the serious analysis of popular culture. After achieving the unremarkable feat of falling out spectacularly with Julie Burchill, a collaborator on the magazine, Young headed for New York and began developing the monstrous pseudo-Toby that regularly sprays its scent on the newspapers and television stations of the world.

Graydon Carter, the flick-haired editor of Vanity Fair, wanted Young to add a little English sauce to his increasingly puffy magazine, but Toby refused to temper his piercing manner and rapidly made enemies of every publicist and celebrity in the city.

"They are much more rigidly hierarchical in America," he says. "In Britain, and I dare say in Ireland, we tend to think we have inherited this awful political system and feel that, however we protest, it's not going to change. Americans feel they created the system and that people actually deserve their status." Toby Young turned his Vanity Fairexperiences into a best-selling memoir entitled How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, and that book has now mutated into a romantic comedy starring Kirsten Dunst and Simon Pegg. Here we see the Young persona in all its supposed wretchedness. The book's casually self-lacerating tone suggests that its author rather enjoys being viewed as an ill-mannered, pushy, disrespectful yob. Toby Young has, it seems, decided that he is happy being The Man You Love to Hate.

He's this generation's Michael Winner. He's a Jeremy Beadle for the 21st century.

I'm not sure he is really up for being disliked today. Slightly tubby and unashamedly bald, Young, now 45, chats amiably and articulately throughout the interview. It must, I guess, be a strain having to generate antagonism all the time. Even though he has contributed to the myth, he can't brush off all the negative comments in the press.

Every now and then, one of the barbs will, surely, find its target.

"Most of it is water of a duck's back, actually," he says. "But occasionally somebody says something that gets through the rhinoceros hide." He goes on to discuss A Right Royal Farce, his poorly received play focusing on sexual antics among the British royal family. A year before its unhappy run, Young had surprising success with Who's the Daddy?, a comedy involving the bedroom shenanigans of his pals at the Spectatormagazine, but the press were not amused by the follow-up.

"It was an unqualified disaster," he says. "Nicholas de Jongh, the Evening Standard's drama critic, described it as the worst example of authorial ineptitude to grace the London stage since the Blitz. Now that hurts." So when people make negative comments about the writing that gets to him? "Yes. That's right. And when they are nice, even if it's somebody I have previously hated, I feel this outpouring of warmth towards them."

HE MAY NOT like people saying his writing stinks, but Young doesn't seem too perturbed when publicists formulate myths concerning his supposedly abrasive personality. Earlier this year a story emerged from the production of How to Lose Friends and Alienate Peoplestating that Young had been banished from the set by Robert Weide, the film's director. He had, it seems, rubbed Kirsten Dunst up the wrong way - the reader's imagination was, here, invited to run riot - and forced Weide to phone for the security mob. Ah, good old, bad old Toby Young. He really knows how to lose friends and alienate people. Get it? The story read like a concoction.

"Once you have been saddled with a persona it is very hard to shake it off," he agrees. "These stories get invented to fit the narrative. No. That story is not true. The truth is, in fact, much more boring."

He goes on to tell a tale that is, indeed, considerably more tedious and that - genuinely unintentionally, I feel - makes Dunst (or her assistant) seem somewhat precious. Anyway, whatever the truth of that particular anecdote, Toby Young has certainly traded on his status as The Man You Love to Hate (even if many people think that title only 50 per cent accurate).

Many of the stories in How to Lose Friends and Alienate Peopleand its successor, The Sound of No Hands Clapping, in which he fails to take Hollywood, do make your toes curl with discomfort and disapproval. Would it be fair to say that he and his pals in the Groucho Club, the Soho media hangout, dreamt up this disagreeable persona? Surely he thinks himself nicer than his books suggest.

Young pauses for a long, long time.

"Well, I don't know," he eventually says. "My difficulty is I always think people will be tickled to death by my antics. Then I got in trouble when they weren't tickled by them at Vanity Fair. Americans didn't find me funny, but I felt sure the British would. But I was surprised that many British readers of How to Lose Friends and Alienate Peoplefound me as obnoxious as my colleagues at Vanity Fair had. For dramatic purposes, I do exaggerate that. What surprises me is how literally people take those stories. Some people do get it. They realise I don't behave quite as badly as all that. But many don't. I don't know quite what to do about that."

I think I will choose to view this as an admission that nasty Toby Young really is an invention of (from what I have seen) perfectly nice, perfectly polite Toby Young. After all, following the years of cocaine and cavorting, he is now happily settled in domestic bliss with his wife, Caroline Bondy, and their four children. He occasionally turns up on telly to scowl at amateur chefs on Eating with the Enemyor chew over the week's cultural affairs on Newsnight Review, but the professional jerk is much less visible than before.

HE EVEN ADMITS to getting on with Julie Burchill now. The Modern Reviewexperiment collapsed when Burchill, former communist, now committed Lutheran and Ulster Unionist, left her husband, colleague Cosmo Landesman, for another writer on the magazine, Charlotte Raven.

The perennially eccentric Burchill then tried to install her new lover as editor.

Was this all a circus put on to entertain the readers? "Oh, we genuinely fell out," he says. "I felt a real sense of betrayal. I gave Julie a leg up with the Modern Reviewand then she wanted to fire me and replace her with her girlfriend. I thought that was incredibly ungrateful."

Didn't Raven then refer to Young as being "like Hitler" in print? "That was a bit harsh," he laughs. "Somebody told her I had gone underground and she said I was 'like Hitler cowering in his bunker'. I don't think she was saying I was like Hitler in any other way. But I have got quite pally with Julie again. I saw her last night."

Well, this is the problem. When we hear that Burchill and Young are now chums, we begin to suspect that the Groucho Club mob devised the Modern Reviewbust-up for the entertainment of the reading public.

Maybe they dreamt up the whole Man You Love to Hate scheme on the same evening.

Young laughs.

"Oh I assure you, we are really not that sophisticated." If you say so.

The film How to Lose Friends and Alienate Peopleis on general release now