Toby Young

I’m feeling quite smug at the moment. Every year I vow to get in shape in the summer, which means losing weight, drinking less and going to the gym. The summer bit is because there’s a risk I’ll be seen in a swimming costume – I want a ‘beach-ready body’ – and there’s also the exposure that comes from wearing fewer clothes when the sun’s out and the weather’s warm. Anyway, this summer I managed it. I’ve lost about a stone, am down to about half a bottle of wine a day, and have started working out again after an eight-year hiatus. I might hesitate to strut about at the local lido in budgie smugglers, but the dad bod has gone.

Charlie, my 17-year-old son, was hopeful about QPR’s chances this season. True, we managed to avoid relegation only by the skin of our teeth in 2024-25, but we’ve just appointed a new manager: a Frenchman called Julien Stéphan, who won the Coupe de France in 2019 with Rennes, beating Paris Saint-Germain in the final, and getting into the last eight of the Europa League. In addition, we’ve had what football fans call a ‘good window’, recruiting several promising young players in the summer transfer period, including a much needed striker in the form of Richard Kone, a 22-year-old Ivorian who scored 21 goals for Wycombe Wanders last season. ‘I think we’re looking at a top six finish,’ said Charlie.

On the face of it, Wormwood Scrubs is not particularly appealing. I don’t mean the prison, but the common in the north-eastern corner of Hammersmith and Fulham. It is 170 acres of unsupervised scrubland with enough wooded areas to attract a smattering of predatory homosexuals – a poor man’s Hampstead Heath. Often, as I walk the dog around the perimeter, the only people I encounter are single men in tight T-shirts who eye me enquiringly as we pass. I respond by looking pointedly at Mali, as if to say: ‘Can’t you see I’m walking my dog, not cruising for action?’ Then again, Mali is a Cavapoochon, so perhaps they don’t get the message. Caroline is not a fan, preferring the more genteel Gunnersbury Park.

I’m just back from Vancouver, where I was speaking at a fundraiser for the Free Speech Union of Canada. At the dinner afterwards I sat next to an Alberta separatist, a movement I was unaware of until now. Dating to the 19th century, it advocates for the secession of the province of Alberta and has been given a renewed impetus by the federal government’s hostility to fossil fuels under Justin Trudeau and now Mark Carney. Petroleum is Alberta’s biggest industry by far, and the revenue generated by energy exports means the province is a big contributor to Canada’s national budget, with its net contributions dwarfing those of other provinces.

When I was a young man, the claim that Britain was in danger of becoming the 51st state was a political slur mainly thrown about by the left, particularly those who objected to the presence of US military bases. But there was some anti-American sentiment on the right, too – Enoch Powell, for instance, had a dislike of America’s hostility to the Empire that dated back to his service in the second world war. I’m even guilty of some anti--American prejudice myself and wrote a memoir in which I tried to convey that my failure to take Manhattan in the mid-1990s was because I wasn’t willing to sell my soul to Mammon. Well, I take it all back.

I was surprised to read a report by Sunder Katwala’s thinktank British Future saying the UK is a ‘powder keg’ of community tensions and warning of further unrest this summer. In a foreword by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, who are co-chairing a commission looking into last year’s riots, Britain is described as ‘fragmented’ and ‘fragile’, seemingly only one newspaper headline away from descending into civil war. Aren’t these the same public intellectuals and politicians who, until ten minutes ago, were cheerleaders for multiculturalism? I thought the arrivalof hundreds of thousands of immigrants a year was enriching our street life, improving our cuisine and revitalising our art and literature?

About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I’d read Wolfe’s essay in Harper’s magazine called ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’ in which he urges ambitious young authors to dispense with namby-pamby, post-modernist experimental nonsense and follow in the footsteps of Balzac, Zola and Dickens – write realistic novels documenting every aspect of contemporary society in granular detail. I wrote a 10,000-word proposal summarising the story, which began with a black teenage drug dealer coming to the rescue of a posh teenage girl in Shepherd’s Bush by fighting off a group of roadmen trying to steal her puppy.

Earlier this week, GB News again found itself at odds with Ofcom. The channel had written to the broadcast regulator asking if, in light of the Supreme Court judgment affirming that the word ‘sex’ in the Equality Act means biological sex, it could now treat the dispute between trans-rights activists and gender-critical feminists as a ‘settled’ matter. ‘Broadly settled’ was the phrase Ofcom applied to the ‘theory of anthropogenic global warming’ in a guidance note issued in 2013 stating that broadcasters were no longer under an obligation to be impartial when discussing the issue. GB News wanted to know whether the regulator would extend the same latitude to debates about sex- and gender-based rights. Incredibly, Ofcom’s answer was ‘no’.

So here’s the question I’ve been wrestling with since Bob Vylan chanted ‘Death, death to the IDF’ at Glastonbury at the weekend. Is Bob Vylan a ‘he’ or a ‘they’? I don’t mean a they/them, although that might be the case. I mean is Bob Vylan a person or a band? I keep seeing Bob Vylan referred to as ‘him’, including by the BBC, but a cursory Google search reveals that they are in fact a punk rap duo, with neither performer actually named Bob. Is the band’s name supposed to be a play on Bob Dylan? And if they’re embracing the word ‘vylan’, presumably a synonym for ‘villain’, they can’t really complain about being prosecuted for their on-stage antics.

God, men are pathetic. At least, that’s the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come up with a new term to explain the emotional labour women are having to do to help men cope with their psychological problems: ‘mankeeping’. According to Ferrara, ‘patriarchal masculinity’ stops men from developing ‘emotionally intimate bonds’ with each other, so they inevitably unburden themselves to their wives and girlfriends, expecting them to listen attentively as they drone on about their ‘issues’. They can’t open up to their male buddies about this stuff because they don’t want to appear vulnerable and unmanly. So they unload on their female partners instead.

One of the objections to the military parade in Washington, DC last Saturday – supposedly to mark the 250th birthday of the US Army – is that it was a breach of democratic norms. The real reason it took place, say Donald Trump’s critics, was because he wanted to celebrate his 79th birthday with a display of military might – which is ‘what dictators do’, according to a general who advised him against it. Trump’s opponents gleefully pointed out that the number of attendees – around 200,000 – was dwarfed by the millions who took part in simultaneous ‘No Kings’ protests in dozens of American cities, a reference to his habit of describing himself as a ‘King’.

In the canteen of the House of Lords last week, a friendly server asked me if I’d like some ‘Pride pudding’. This turned out to be a rainbow-coloured crumble created in honour of Pride month. ‘Er, no thanks,’ I said, and then noticed a large ‘Progress Pride’ flag behind the counter. Oh dear, I thought. That’ll set the cat among the pigeons. Sure enough, a couple of hours later the GC Cons Peers’ WhatsApp group erupted. This is made up of those dinosaurs who style themselves ‘gender critical’ – i.e. they believe sex is biological, binary and immutable. For the uninitiated, the Progress Pride flag features a large, multicoloured chevron superimposed on the standard rainbow layout.