Toby Young

My oldest friend, Sean Langan, was back in the news this week. He’s carved out a niche for himself as a maker of low-budget documentaries in conflict zones and his most recent film was shown on ITV on Monday night. He keeps costs down by shooting them himself on a hand-held camera, which isn’t easy given that he also stars in them. This involves holding a camcorder at arm’s length and pointing it at himself as he wanders through some of the world’s most dangerous hot spots, often in the midst of explosions and gunfire. He’s paid a heavy price for being a war correspondent with his finances suffering and even losing several teeth The fact that he’s a one-man band means he’s able to make films in places few other documentary--makers can reach.

In 2017, David Lloyd Clubs took out a long lease on the privately owned sports facility at the end of my road. It used to be called the Park Club, but the new leaseholders, having spent £9 million tarting it up, proposed to call it ‘David Lloyd Chiswick Park’. As a proud resident of Acton, I was outraged and wrote to the CEO, pointing out that the new name would antagonise the locals by implying there was something shameful about their area. ‘The club is on a street called East Acton Lane, it’s about 250 yards from a railway station called Acton Central and 500 yards from a sign saying “Welcome to Acton”,’ I wrote. ‘If you pretend the club is located in Chiswick you will be ridiculed.

I don’t know what I’d do if QPR banned me from Loftus Road for the next two-and-a-half years. It was bad enough not being able to go to games during lockdown, but the thought of all my mates attending while I was stuck at home would be devastating. When the Rs are playing at home I look forward to the match all week – it’s become my only social activity that isn’t related to work, a vital safety valve. It would be devastating to my mental wellbeing. Yet that’s exactly what’s happened to Linzi Smith, a 34-year-old Newcastle fan. On 31 October last year she was banned from St James’ Park for the remainder of this season and the next two. Why? Not for getting into a fight in the stadium or abusing a steward.

By the time you read this, my son Ludo will be in South America, where he’s gone for what remains of his gap year. He deferred his university place and has been working in a pub since he left school, trying to earn enough money to go travelling. I made the mistake of telling him I’d match whatever he managed to save, imagining he’d struggle to put aside more than £500. Turns out, the little bugger saved more than £5,000! Still, he’s going to need £10,000 to pay his expenses. He’s spending the first four months in Brazil and doesn’t speak a word of Portuguese, so will struggle to get a part-time job, even in a bar. His girlfriend is joining him in four months and they’re planning to embark on a South American tour, beginning with Peru.

The UK Health Security Agency is sufficiently concerned about the growing number of measles cases in the West Midlands that it declared a ‘national incident’ last week. According to official figures, there have been 216 confirmed and 103 probable measles cases in the region since last October. The cause? The uptake of the MMR vaccine is at its lowest level in more than a decade, according to Dame Jenny Harries, CEO of the UKHSA. For some, this is proof of the ‘harm’ that anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists can do if greater efforts aren’t made to silence them. A leading article in the Times blamed the outbreak on ‘disease disinformation’, accusing activists of waging ‘irresponsible and immoral campaigns’.

My column from a fortnight ago seeking advice about how to limit my alcohol intake has produced a huge response – and not just from readers. At a dinner last week to commemorate Paul Johnson, a famous historian told me how he manages to be so prolific while still enjoying several glasses every night. He rises each day at 4.30 a.m., spends six hours at his desk doing serious work, then does an hour of admin, has a nice lunch, followed by an afternoon nap, another couple of hours’ work and finally a good dinner. ‘The key is the afternoon nap,’ he said. ‘It’s a way of turning one day into two.’ Unfortunately for me, this requires a superhuman effort of will, but then so did many of the other suggestions.

The death of Derek Draper, the former Labour party apparatchik, got acres of press coverage, with tributes pouring in from the great and the good, including Tony Blair. But reading the obituaries, I couldn’t help feel that they didn’t do justice to the man I first met in the early 1990s, and for a time counted among my closest friends. They neither captured the full extent of his skulduggery nor how entertaining he could be when relating the latest gossip from Blair’s inner circle. His friend Decca Aitkenhead’s piece in the Sunday Times came closest, but she left out one of my favourite anecdotes, perhaps because it involves her. As I recall, Derek’s wife, the TV presenter Kate Garraway, had sold a package to OK!

One of the things I look forward to most about Christmas is the football, something that’s particularly true if you’re a fan of a team in one of the lower tiers. Premier League clubs play 38 games per season, not counting the FA Cup, the Carabao Cup and any European competitions they happen to be in. Championship clubs, by contrast, play 46 league games every season and try to cram in as many as they can over the holidays. But even allowing for that, QPR has an unusually crowded fixture list this year – no fewer than eight matches between 1 December and 1 January. The last time I went to see Millwall, with all four kids in tow, we were locked in a metal cage at the exit. This was for our own safety, the stewards explained This would normally have me purring with pleasure.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Garrick. Named after an 18th-century theatrical impresario, it was established in 1831 as a club where ‘actors and men of refinement and education might meet on equal terms’, and in the intervening years it has admitted members of other equally disreputable professions – lawyers, writers, surgeons, journalists. I was put up myself about 15 years ago, but blackballed by the chair of the catering committee who took exception to a throwaway remark I’d made about the food. I intend to reapply, but will probably be blackballed again on account of the argument I’m about to make in defence of the club’s ‘men only’ membership policy. Why am I against admitting women?

According to a friend who sold a successful consulting business a few years ago, the problem with employing middle-class Britons, unlike Americans, is that there’s a summit to their ambitions. Once they’ve earned enough money to trade in their BMW for a Porsche, install a new kitchen and create an attic room with a dormer window, they start taking it easy. ‘Those are the only three things they really want,’ he says. As a freelance journalist, I’ve abandoned all hope of owning a Porsche or getting the attic done. But after living in the same house in Acton for 15 years, I’m finally remodelling the kitchen. Or rather Caroline is.

Many of my conservative friends are beginning to catastrophise about the future of Britain in light of the pro-Palestinian protests that have erupted in our major cities over the past month. ‘I think you’re screwed,’ an American philosopher told me on Monday. ‘You should have raised the alarm about immigration from Muslim countries 25 years ago and now it’s too late. The fox is in the hen house.’ Such pessimism is coming to a head this weekend, with tens of thousands of protestors threatening to disrupt the Remembrance ceremonies which are taking place over two days owing to 11 November falling on a Saturday.

I was disappointed to learn that Rishi Sunak has reconsidered his opposition to a bill banning conversion therapy. Not because I’m in favour of it, obviously. The baffling thing about Sunak’s change of heart is that conversion therapy, as commonly understood, has been banned in this country for years. As the government’s own briefing on the subject put it in 2021: ‘Our existing criminal law framework means that conversion therapy amounting to offences of physical or sexual violence is already illegal in this country.’ If a girl who believes she’s a boy is urged by her doctor to see a therapist, that doctor would be breaking the law So what is it Sunak wants to outlaw?

You almost certainly haven’t heard of the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), although you probably should have. It’s a BBC-led consortium of the world’s most powerful news, social media and technology companies that seeks to cleanse the internet of ‘disinformation’. It carries out this mission by doing its best to discredit sites that challenge the prevailing narrative on topics like lockdowns, Covid vaccines, electoral fraud, the Ukraine war and climate change. It was founded in 2019 by Jessica Cecil, a senior BBC executive who, in 2021, was part of the Counter Disinformation Policy Forum, a shadowy group of ‘experts’ convened by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to monitor criticism of the government’s pandemic response.

By the time you read this I’ll be 60, having passed that milestone on Tuesday. My older friends tell me that turning 60 is like having to give a speech in public – the anticipation is worse than the reality. Once it’s in your rear-view mirror, you quickly forget about it and instead start looking ahead and thinking about the national speed limit. But as I write it’s looming like the horror of the shade, to quote William Ernest Henley. I’m loath to bellyache about this because I can imagine being incredibly irritated when, in 20 years’ time, I read a column by some young whippersnapper complaining about turning 60. ‘Call that old?’ I’ll think to myself. ‘Try dealing with rheumatism and gout and cardiovascular disease, you ungrateful little sod.

In spite of my dodgy right hand – caused by an injury to my radial nerve – I decided to go stalking in the Highlands last weekend. Recovery from such injuries is quite slow, but enough mobility had returned to my trigger finger for me to give it a whirl. Invitations to hunt stags in the Cairngorms National Park are nothing to be sniffed at, particularly as the Scottish government seems determined to phase out stalking, along with fishing, grouse shooting and all the other country sports associated with rich Scottish landowners. The war being waged by the SNP and the Greens against the owners of private estates is motivated by class envy but it’s dressed up as a high-minded attempt to save the planet.

I first realised something was wrong with my hand last Thursday evening. I’d been invited by a friend to go shooting at his grouse moor in Yorkshire and the bedroom I’d been assigned had a stiff wooden door. After a hearty supper, I returned to my room and gave the door a shove with my shoulder to force it open. The next thing I knew I couldn’t move any of the fingers on my right hand. The following morning it was no better. Pulling on my plus fours, tucking them into a pair of woollen socks and fastening the garter ties was a work of colossal administration. As for the buttons on my shirt, I gave up after ten minutes and just pulled my shooting sweater over the top. When I arrived on the moor it quickly became apparent that I was destined to shoot even fewer birds than usual.