Toby Young

The big revelation in Lord Ashcroft’s forthcoming biography of Nigel Farage is that he’s been banned from Desert Island Discs. According to Ashcroft’s sources, an appearance by the Reform UK leader would make some BBC employees feel ‘unsafe’ and might lead to other high-profile figures boycotting the long-running show. ‘I have come to expect nothing less from the BBC,’ Farage told the Mail on Sunday. ‘Their blatant bias has been obvious for years.’ The BBC has categorically denied the story and, in fairness, its ‘blatant bias’ doesn’t extend to Question Time, which Farage has appeared on about 40 times in the past 26 years.

I’ve spent the last few days composing a response to the government’s consultation on whether to introduce a statutory minimum age for sites like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. The consultation, announced on 19 January, was intended to spike the guns of Lord Nash, a Conservative peer who’d proposed an amendment to the Schools Bill banning under-16s from social media. It didn’t work and his amendment was carried two days later, although he was later persuaded to withdraw it after the government tabled its own amendment pledging to impose some kind of ban regardless.

How worried should we be about AI? Absolutely petrified, according to a new documentary called Chasing Utopia. Billed as the Inconvenient Truth of the digital age, it’s a shop window for the alarmist predictions of Mo Gawdat, a former chief business officer at Google X who’s reinvented himself as the Al Gore of AI. The filmmakers follow him on a global speaking tour, delivering the same TED talk to interchangeable groups of credulous young people. ‘Beware!’ is his message. If we don’t rapidly change course, we’ll soon be at the mercy of a superior alien intelligence that sees humans in much the same way we view chimpanzees. I don’t buy it – partly because I think we’re a long way from artificial general intelligence, let alone artificial superintelligence.

At the time of writing, I haven’t seen the King’s Speech, but it’s a safe bet it will include a bill to enable wayward peers to be stripped of their titles. The point, of course, is so that Keir Starmer, if he’s still PM by then, can show us just how much he loathes Peter Mandelson. It’s the equivalent of Loyalists after the Restoration exhuming Cromwell’s corpse so they could ‘execute’ him and stick his head on a spike in Westminster Hall. But because Mandelson hasn’t been found guilty of a crime – and is unlikely to be – the bar for removing a title will have to be quite low. It will inevitably be some version of ‘bringing the Lords into disrepute’.

What is the greatest threat to British democracy? Zack Polanski’s call for ‘building a society’ that ‘doesn’t include’ people who ‘identify as right-wing’? Labour’s efforts to flood the Upper House with party apparatchiks? Islamist extremism? The correct answer is Reform UK. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new book called What If Reform Wins by the Times reporter Peter Chappell. Before I get to its flaws, I should acknowledge it’s an enjoyable read, with plenty of deft, comic touches. It imagines that Reform wins a majority in June 2029, and then gives a blow-by-blow account of the constitutional crisis that follows, with the informal rules and conventions underpinning our democracy being stress-tested and found wanting.

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian published an article entitled: ‘“I feel like I’m losing her”: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right’. It was full of heart-rending tales from metropolitan liberals about how their dim-witted parents had been duped into believing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories by following people like Rupert Lowe on social media. One particularly exasperated man suggested a course of therapy for his mother, fearing that she might want to join Reform. But is it really the online radicalisation of elderly parents that’s putting families under pressure in the run-up to the local elections? I suspect it has more to do with their children, particularly their daughters, embracing a toxic strain of identity politics imported from America.

The American dream is dying, according to the Times. To mark the US’s 250th anniversary, the paper commissioned YouGov to explore whether the country’s citizens still believe that if you ‘work hard and play by the rules’ you will eventually be successful. Turns out, only 38 per cent of the respondents think this applies to all Americans, while 59 per cent think the American dream is now less attainable than it was when they were growing up. In addition, 38 per cent rated today’s quality of life as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’, compared with 60 per cent who said the same about 1976, the bicentennial year.

I was leaving the CNN presidential election night party at dawn in 2016, having celebrated Donald Trump’s victory, when Paul Staines, then the editor of Guido Fawkes, turned to me and asked: ‘Are we the baddies?’ This was a reference to a Mitchell and Webb sketch set during the second world war in which the question is asked by one Nazi of another. I assured him we were not, but it was a genuine moment of self-reflection on Paul’s part, not a joke. I don’t suppose Jolyon Maugham KC has ever been afflicted by such doubts, even after bludgeoning a fox to death with a baseball bat in 2019. Scarcely a week passes without the social justice warrior trying to drag someone into court or lodging an official complaint about them.

In 1956, three British MPs encountered a group of Swiss politicians in the bar of the Hotel Fluela in Davos and after a few drinks challenged them to a ski race. A timed slalom contest took place the following day, with the three-person Swiss team beating the Brits by a combined four seconds. Not willing to take this lying down, the MPs insisted on a rematch the following year and thus was born the Anglo-Swiss Parliamentary Ski Week, which celebrated its 70th anniversary last week. I heard about it from my friend Dan Hannan shortly after I became a peer, and immediately put my name down, imagining it to be a massive freebie. Not so. The Graubunden canton provides you with a free lift pass, and the local ski school, which organises the races, throws in some complimentary guides.

At the beginning of the current football season, I thought there was a real chance that QPR would get promoted. We refreshed our squad with some smart recruitment over the summer, brought in a couple of strikers and hired a new manager in the form of Julien Stéphan, who’d steered Rennes to victory in the Coupe de France. The Hoops have been languishing in the second tier of English football for more than ten years and it looked like we might finally escape. I’d even begun to fantasise about launching a campaign to get rid of VAR in the Premier League, where it’s been in use since 2019. Earlier this week, a poll by the Football Supporters’ Association revealed that three-quarters of fans want to scrap it, with 97 per cent saying it hadn’t made watching football more enjoyable.

This week marks the fifth anniversary of the publication of the report of Lord Sewell’s Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities (CRED). In spite of a suitably diverse group of commissioners (or perhaps because of that), it refused to blame ‘systemic racism’ for the underachievement of certain ethnic minorities. It didn’t dismiss that hypothesis entirely, but concluded that other factors, particularly class, geography and family background, were more important. This analysis – supported by lots of data – did little to protect the commissioners from the fury of the woke left, who denounced them for ignoring historical injustices. Exhibit A in the report’s argument was the poor educational performance of white working-class boys.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Louis Theroux. I wouldn’t call him a friend, exactly, but I’ve known him for about 40 years. We started our journalistic careers at the same time and would frequently bump into each other at parties. He’s intelligent and funny and, in person, doesn’t answer every question with a question or pretend to be puzzled when he’s evidently long made up his mind. The passive--aggressive ‘just asking questions’ routine is, thankfully, confined to his TV appearances. By this I mean he has no hesitation in telling me I’m being ‘unbelievably stupid’ – which, because we disagree about politics, is quite often. But he’s a QPR fan so I can forgive these outbursts.

On Monday, the Communities Secretary Steve Reed rose in the House of Commons to unveil ‘Protecting What Matters’, the government’s new ‘action plan’ to ‘strengthen social cohesion’ and ‘tackle division’. According to the accompanying press release: ‘Millions of families, friends and neighbours will feel a stronger sense of community, unity and national pride thanks to renewed efforts to stamp out extremism, hate and division announced today.’ I was not among those millions. Conspicuous by omission in the announcement was any mention of Islamism.

The bomb shelter reserved for ‘volunteers’ at Kibbutz Dafna near the town of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel was definitely substandard. It was damp and smelly, more like a lavatory than a fortified bunker, and not considered fit for the kibbutzniks: a pampered species compared to us. But when the Soviet-built ordnance started raining down on us, it did its job. We emerged, unharmed, the following morning, blinking into the dawn light. The terrorists had not succeeded in hitting the kibbutz with a single Katyusha rocket. No, I’m not embedded with the Israel Defence Forces on the Lebanese border, although the area surrounding Kiryat Shmona was under fire from Hezbollah earlier this week. This was in 1981 and I was just 17.

If the newspaper reports are correct and Margaret Hodge is about to be named as the next chair of Ofcom, it’s a surprising choice. The current chair, Michael Grade, had a storied television career, whereas Hodge has never worked in the media. But the most jaw-dropping thing about this appointment is that she’s 81. Not that I’ve got anything against octogenarians – I’ll be one myself in the blink of an eye. But the government has. In its manifesto, Labour promised to introduce a mandatory retirement age of 80 in the House of Lords, and it’s already set the wheels in motion. Why is Margaret Hodge considered to be too old to sit in the Upper House, but not too old to chair a public regulator? To complicate things, Sir Keir Starmer made her a peer in August 2024.

Hope Not Hate is up to its usual tricks in the Denton and Gorton by-election, keeping Britain safe from fascists. In this case, the local Brownshirt is not the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, who implicitly compared Israel to Nazi Germany in a social media post on Holocaust Memorial Day last year. No, it’s the Reform UK candidate, Matt Goodwin. According to this ‘non-partisan’ thinktank– that’s how it describes itself – Goodwin is a ‘far-right provocateur’ who, if elected ‘will become one of the most extreme MPs in the House of Commons, perhaps second only to Rupert Lowe’. Hope Not Hate has form in this regard.