More from life

Toby Young

How (and why) we lie to ourselves about opinion polls

A strange ritual takes place on Twitter most evenings at around 10.30 p.m. Hundreds of political anoraks start tweeting the results of the YouGov daily tracker poll due to be published in the following day’s Sun. Some of them are neutrals, but the majority are politically aligned and will only tweet those results that show

Disneyland comes to the Cheltenham Festival

Irish racing guru Ted Walsh was asked at the start of Gold Cup day if retiring champion jockey Tony McCoy could win his last Cheltenham Festival race. ‘No,’ came the unsentimental reply. ‘This is Cheltenham, not Disneyland.’ But within three hours, racing’s raucous pilgrims cheered home a fairytale winner: the novice Coneygree ran his rivals

Toby Young

Could my son Charlie become a Premier League footballer?

My son Charlie was scouted by QPR last week. I say ‘scouted’, but that’s not quite accurate since he’s only six. Rather, a man claiming to be a member of the club’s coaching staff suggested I bring him along to the QPR pre-academy in Willesden. At first, I was suspicious. The man in question teaches

Racing’s biggest issue is the decline in field sizes

‘I don’t want to seem unromantic,’ said Mrs Oakley as St Valentine’s Day approached, ‘but this year please don’t buy another of those Monet cards you seem to find appropriate for all occasions from birthdays to anniversaries.’ And there was me thinking I had cleverly avoided slush and over-commercialism all these years. Behaviour patterns creep

Toby Young

My plan for Question Time: mug up and fail anyway

I was invited on Question Time this week, which gave me a few sleepless nights. Natalie Bennett’s disastrous interview on LBC was a reminder that appearing on a current affairs programme in this febrile pre-election environment can be a bit of a minefield. Admittedly, I’m not the leader of a political party but that’s no

The elderly are society’s new baddies

The gulf in understanding between the old and the young has widened with the news that the young are beginning to turn teetotal. If there was one thing that the old thought they knew about the young, it was that they drank too much. British youth led the world in its enthusiasm for alcohol. Our

Toby Young

Immigration, not money, will improve Scotland’s most deprived schools

I suppose we should be thankful that Nicola Sturgeon has acknowledged there’s a problem with Scotland’s public education system, even if she’s hit upon the wrong solution. Earlier this week, the First Minister announced that the Scottish -government would be trying out its version of ‘the London challenge’, a programme carried out by the last