Toby Young

 As I exited the Today programme last week, my phone buzzed, indicating I had just received a text message. Which one of my friends was congratulating me on having just trounced another government minister? According to the LCD screen it was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall! Hugh is an old Oxford contemporary whom I hadn’t heard from in

Like most middle-class parents, I feel duty-bound to take my children to the theatre occasionally. Why is this? I tell myself it is a way of broadening their horizons, but really it is all about class. It is the same reason I encourage them to play with wooden toys and eat broccoli and say ‘please’.

‘Antichrist’ is the comic masterpiece of a con artist mocking fans of high culture Is Antichrist, the new film from Lars von Trier, a comedy? At first glance, that seems like a ludicrous suggestion. It contains some of the most disturbing images I’ve ever seen in the cinema, including a scene in which Charlotte Gainsbourg

My heart goes out to Hardeep Singh Kohli, the turban-wearing comed-ian and writer (and a contributing editor to this magazine). According to a BBC spokeswoman, he has been suspended from The One Show for six months following a complaint by a female colleague. ‘He was reprimanded and immediately apologised,’ she said. ‘He agreed to take

As funny as Bruno undoubtedly is, Baron-Cohen’s film is fundamentally dishonest One of the funniest scenes in Bruno is when Sacha Baron-Cohen, playing the gay Austrian television presenter, appears on a talk show in Texas called The Richard Bey Show. The African-American audience is none too impressed when he tells them he’s looking for a

‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Father’s Day piece that described a typical Sunday in my life. Essentially, it involved being an indentured slave to my four young children. Several people pointed out that I was guilty of ‘helicopter

By my epic standards, this was an extremely polite best man’s speech It never ceases to amaze me that I am still asked to speak in public. If I am not the worst orator of my generation, I must be a close second. The last time I performed an after-dinner speaking gig was in Bath

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet. In Iran, the anti-government

For several weeks now I have been agonising about whether to run for Parliament as an independent at the next election. On the one hand, the current political crisis means that an independent has a higher-than-normal chance of being elected. But on the other, it is not clear what an MP who isn’t affiliated with

I am not a particularly religious man, but occasionally something happens that convinces me there really is a God. I was in the Virgin Atlantic departure lounge in Las Vegas, resigned to spending the next nine-and-a-half hours sitting in Economy with my family, when an announcement came over the tannoy: ‘Would Toby Young please come

Las Vegas is the polar opposite of the nanny state. Which is why it’s under threat My friend Rob Long, an American television producer, once joked that he couldn’t understand the movie Leaving Las Vegas. ‘I just don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Why would anyone want to leave Las Vegas?’ After spending four weeks here,

I flatter myself that I’m a Vegas insider, but in fact I’m just a regular sucker I am spending the entire month of May in Las Vegas making an American television programme and I am not having a good time. Before embarking on this trip, I indulged in all sorts of fantasies about what might

‘This is a great metaphor for the death of Vegas,’ I said, indicating the room I was in. The journalist I was with had billed it as an exclusive club where illusionists tried out their latest tricks, but it was more like a support group for unemployed magicians. Most of them were standing behind trestle

As with all road accidents, there was that initial feeling of euphoria — a kind of ecstatic languor. Why is that? Is it to do with losing control? It’s gone almost before you notice it, and then the internal audit begins. I knew I’d hit my head quite hard because I had to struggle to

Next weekend, I am planning to meet up with an old friend in Las Vegas. I have a direct flight booked with Virgin Atlantic, a reservation at the best restaurant in town and, most importantly, two tickets to Crazy Horse Paris at the MGM Grand. But in the past few days I’ve been having second