More from life

Long life | 3 November 2016

For almost 400 years, since it was built on the orders of Pope Urban VIII in the 17th century, the grand Apostolic Palace at Castel Gandolfo on a lake in the Alban Hills south of Rome has been the place where popes have retreated to get away from the city’s summer heat. John Paul II

Toby Young

Looking after Leo

I’ve just spent a day looking after our one-year-old vizsla and, to be blunt, I have some sympathy with Michael Heseltine’s decision to strangle his mother’s alsatian. Not that my wife is out of town. Rather, I’ve just got a new job as director of the New Schools Network, a charity that helps groups set

Long life | 27 October 2016

I may have made the odd disparaging remark about Brexiteers during the heat of the referendum campaign, but I have been the perfect gentleman since. Although a Remainer, I have accepted the referendum result with good grace and treated the winners with courtesy and respect. I’ve never called them swivel-eyed, or xenophobic, or racist (or

The switchers

‘He’s such a good competitor. He works so hard and he deserves it,’ said his predecessor Lewis Hamilton after Nico Rosberg won this season’s Formula One drivers’ championship. Replied Rosberg,the new champion: ‘He’s a top man and a top driver. He’s like Robocop. I thought I could pull clear of him but he kept coming

Toby Young

In defence of Zac Goldsmith

I’m baffled by the reaction to Zac Goldsmith’s decision to resign as the Conservative MP for Richmond Park. It is being interpreted, even by MPs on his own side, as an act of opportunism, a chance to rehabilitate himself with the metropolitan elite after his bruising defeat in the London mayoral election. Surprisingly few people

Long life | 20 October 2016

‘Welcome, Mr Chancellor, to the Age UK community,’ said the voice. It was a warm, friendly woman’s voice, but bearing a chilling message. At 76, I willingly accept that I am no longer young, but I don’t want to belong to a club for which old age is the only membership qualification. I don’t want

Toby Young

Driverless cars will make your life worse

On the face of it, there’s something quite appealing about driverless cars. It will be like having a chauffeur-driven chariot at your beck and call, except it will be no more expensive than owning a car. Indeed, it might well be-cheaper because you’ll be less likely to have an accident, so insurance premiums will be

The master of Ballydoyle

The only downside about going racing is irritation born of encountering pig ignorant people who talk through their pockets. Beside me at a Newmarket betting counter on Saturday shortly after Aidan O’Brien had once more dominated the big event of the day, not only winning the Dewhurst Stakes with his Derby prospect Churchill but taking

Long life | 13 October 2016

Monty Don, the television gardening presenter, always comes across on screen as irrepressibly cheerful and enthusiastic, but this is a misleading impression. In fact, he gets black moods. ‘It’s no secret that for many years I’ve suffered from depression,’ he said last week at the Cheltenham Literary Festival. He had tried Prozac and cognitive behavioural

Toby Young

Sorry, Shami, but you’re wasting your money

I’ve been thinking about poor Shami Chakrabarti and the drubbing she’s suffered since it was revealed she’s sending her son to Dulwich College. She joins a long line of Labour hypocrites who are opposed to grammar schools but choose to send their own children to selective schools. The list includes Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Tony

Long life | 6 October 2016

In olden days, before the internet arrived, shopping was quite simple. You’d go into a shop and buy something, and that was it. If you liked the shop, if it sold things you wanted to buy at a fair price, and if the shopkeeper was efficient and agreeable, you might return. But otherwise you wouldn’t.

Toby Young

A good read… but I don’t buy the plot

I’m writing this from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where the mood is buoyant, to put it mildly. Everyone seems delighted with the new captain and completely unfazed by the perilous waters ahead. If anyone is sad about the demise of David Cameron and some of his key lieutenants they’re not letting on. It’s

I know an anti-Tory pact won’t work

I appeared on Radio 4 with Shirley Williams recently and as we were leaving I asked her if she thought Labour might split if Jeremy Corbyn were re-elected. Would the history of the SDP, which she helped set up in 1981, put off Labour moderates from trying something similar? She thought it might, but suggested

Long life | 29 September 2016

Every threatened species of wildlife can count on the friendship of a member of the British royal family. There are few causes that royals can espouse without risking political controversy, but wildlife conservation is seen as one. This may be why they are ready to speak out for any newt, butterfly, or other creature facing

The turf | 29 September 2016

There are few more compulsive reads in racing than the Kingsley Klarion, the in-house journal of Mark Johnston’s Middleham racing operation, which runs under the slightly ambiguous slogan ‘Always trying’. It is ambiguous not because anyone doubts that every Johnston runner is out on the racecourse striving to be first past the post but because

Long life | 22 September 2016

The publication of private emails by Colin Powell has spread panic in Washington. Now nobody feels safe. Some prominent people have even deleted their entire email accounts, fearing that their private messages will be hacked and revealed to the world. It hasn’t been the leaking of official secrets of the kind associated with WikiLeaks and

Toby Young

What’s right about Momentum Kids

Forgive me if I don’t get too worked up about Momentum Kids. For those who haven’t been following Labour’s internal politics too closely, Momentum is a Trotskyist faction within the party that was instrumental in getting Jeremy Corbyn elected last year and, barring an upset, re-elected this weekend. Momentum claims the main purpose of its

Are grammar schools more meritocratic?

‘It is highly unlikely the Prime Minister has read the book,’ my father harrumphed, commenting on the appropriation of the word ‘meritocracy’, which he invented to describe a dystopian society of the future in The Rise of the Meritocracy. That comment appeared in a 2001 article for the Guardian and the Prime Minister in question

Long life | 15 September 2016

It’s been a very patriotic weekend, ablaze with Union flags. In London there was the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and in South Northamptonshire there was the ninth annual ‘Village at War’ festival at Stoke Bruerne on the Grand Union Canal. I watched the first event on television but attended

The turf | 15 September 2016

Say what you like about the St Leger — and I like it a lot — Doncaster’s finale to the British Classics rarely fails to provide a story. In 2012 it was Camelot’s narrow failure to become the first Triple Crown winner of the 2,000 Guineas, the Derby and the Leger since Nijinsky in 1970.