Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
I was having a drink in the Bishops’ Bar in the House of Lords last month when I was introduced to a 92-year-old peer called Lord McColl of Dulwich. I asked him if he’d known my father, Michael, who was made a life peer in 1978. Had they overlapped? He told me he hadn’t merely
When I started working for Vanity Fair in 1995 I remember coming into the office one morning to discover that most of the senior editorial staff had disappeared. They weren’t at their desks, and phone calls went unreturned. Was this a Jewish holiday? It turned out to be the day Graydon Carter had set aside
At the end of my first day at the House of Lords, I staggered out with so many books and leaflets and three-ring binders I could barely see over the top. These were the official rules, what Walter Bagehot would have called the ‘dignified’ part of the constitution. But on top of these are the
This is an extract from today’s episode of Spectator TV, with Toby Young and James Walton, which you can find at the bottom of this page: I wasn’t all that overbowled by the series. I think one of the reasons it’s met with such a chorus of approval, particularly in the mainstream media, is because
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On 23 March 2020, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the unprecedented decision to put the UK into lockdown. To mark the 5th anniversary of that announcement this weekend, we have brought together our editor Michael Gove – then a cabinet minister under Boris – and our associate editor Toby Young – an ardent critic of
One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to cancel the release of Batgirl, a summer blockbuster the studio had spent $90 million making. According to industry insiders, Zaslav thought the politically correct reimagining of the comic book character, whose best friend in the
In an otherwise excellent article for the Sunday Telegraph last week about our government’s hopeless pandemic response, Dan Hannan made one comment I’d like to take issue with. He wrote: ‘For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday
Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were
Is the ‘Cathedral’ about to fall down? That’s the name given by the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin to denote the 21st century’s most prestigious intellectual institutions, particularly in journalism and academia. He’s talking about the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But
I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to spend her third year in a Spanish-speaking country either working or studying. Instead of opting for a university in Barcelona or Madrid, which would be the normal thing to do, she decided to get a
David McKelvey, a former detective chief inspector in the Met Police, has called for the prosecution of Andrew Gwynne, the Labour MP forced to resign as a health minister last weekend for posting racist and sexist comments in a private WhatsApp group. ‘One rule for MPs, another for police officers?’ he asked on LinkedIn, pointing
When I first heard that Angela Rayner had been tasked with creating an advisory council that will draw up an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’, I assumed it was another poisoned chalice handed to her by No. 10, particularly as Dominic Grieve has been suggested as the chair. Is that the same Dominic Grieve who was
A friend of mine got a nasty shock last week after a Google Meet call, thanks to a new AI function that he was unaware of. On this occasion, the consequences were quite funny, but on another day his failure to get his head around this new technology could have ended his career. Had the
It’s wonderful to hear that Professor James Tooley, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, has been reinstated after a gruelling, four-month investigation. James is a member of the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run, and we’ve been helping him navigate this Kafkaesque ordeal. The KC hired by Buckingham to carry out the investigation
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Freddy Gray reads his letter from Washington D.C., and reveals what Liz Truss, Eric Zemmour and Steve Bannon made of Trump’s inauguration (1:22); Tanya Gold writes about the sad truth behind the gypsies facing eviction in Cornwall (7:15); Rose George reviews The Forgotten Sense: The New Science of Smell, by
I can’t say I know the new President of the United States very well, but during the five years I lived in New York between 1995 and 2000 we were on nodding terms. That is to say, when I turned up at a party and he was there too, we would politely acknowledge each other.
The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my ‘to do’ list, getting
So farewell then, Justin Trudeau, last of the lockdown tyrants. Or should that be the last of the democratically elected lockdown tyrants? After all, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin are still in office. But setting aside those authoritarians, it’s difficult to think of a single democratic leader apart from Emmanuel Macron who was in power
One of the biggest regrets of my life was saying yes when Jo Johnson asked if I wanted to be on the board of the Office for Students (OfS) in the autumn of 2017. It wasn’t a particularly prestigious position: the OfS was to be a new regulator of higher education in England and I
When the editor of this magazine called to congratulate me on being given a peerage, he said: ‘It’s QPR’s first win this season.’ Not quite right – we’ve actually won four games this season – but not far off. He touched a nerve because I’ve been thinking about what to call myself to maximise my
