Toby Young

As a member of Bafta, I get sent about 75 ‘screeners’ during the awards season, which is always a treat at the end of the year. I was particularly excited about it this time because of the makeshift home cinema I’ve set up in our playroom. I had fantasies of sitting in there with Caroline and the four kids, munching popcorn as we worked our way through the Bafta hopefuls. However, getting everyone to agree on a film to watch is always tricky in the Young household. On Christmas Eve, my recommendation was a French animated feature called I Lost My Body, which charts the adventures of a hand that’s become separated from its owner.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve associated Christmas with my mentally disabled brother Chris. Technically, he’s my half-brother — I have four half-siblings and a whole one — but to refer to him that way feels a bit mean-spirited, as if I’m trying to put some distance between us. Is ‘mentally disabled’ the right term to describe him? When I was growing up, the psychiatrists had him down as ‘schizophrenic’, but he was later reclassified as suffering from Asperger’s syndrome. After that particular diagnosis fell out of fashion, he became, simply, ‘autistic’, which is probably accurate, although too vague to convey much about him. Chris has been institutionalised since he was a teenager, either in hospitals or care homes.

As Christmas approaches, fighting has broken out in the Young household. No, I’m not talking about my three boys, aged 11, 12 and 14, who have taken to playing a no-holds-barred version of American football in the kitchen. Rather, it’s Caroline and me who have been going at it. My sin has been to assume responsibility for the decor of one of the rooms in our house. This has been Caroline’s domain until now. She chooses which colour to paint the walls, what furniture to buy at Ikea and how that furniture should be arranged. My role is confined to assembling desks and bookshelves and occasionally moving beds around.

If education rather than Brexit or the NHS was the biggest issue in this election campaign, the Tories would be coasting to victory. On Tuesday, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) published its latest rankings, based on tests taken by 15-year-olds in 79 countries, and they show the UK climbing the international league tables. In reading, we’re now 14th (up eight places from 2015); in science, 14th (up a place); and in maths, 18th (up nine places). In other words, British schoolchildren are making huge strides compared to those in other countries. And over a period where money has been pretty tight. Why, then, would you want to overhaul our education system, as the Labour party is proposing to do?

I’ve been contacted by a professor at a leading Russell Group university who is worried about the spread of progressive dogma in the UK’s higher education sector. He highlighted last week’s report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission which claimed that around a quarter of students from ethnic minority backgrounds at Britain’s universities have experienced racial harassment. He fears that this will be used by left-wing activists on campus as ‘proof’ that the higher education sector is ‘systemically racist’ and lead to further calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’.

In February last year, Spectator Life ran an article by Douglas Murray on the arrival of a new group of unorthodox thinkers who were challenging the dogmas of the authoritarian left. People who maintained, among other things, that there are fundamental biological differences between men and women, that free speech is under siege on campus and elsewhere, and that some aspects of western civilisation — in particular, the values of the Enlightenment — are worth defending. Murray’s list included Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, Christina Hoff Sommers: all members of what they jokingly referred to as the ‘intellectual dark web’ (IDW).