More from life

Shortly after midnight on 1 January my phone began to vibrate repeatedly. Happy New Year messages from absent friends? No, I was trending on Twitter — the third-most popular topic on the network after #NYE. The cause was a story about me in the next day’s Guardian that had just gone live. The headline read: ‘Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator.’ Now, that is wildly overstating it. I’ve been appointed to the board of the Office for Students (OfS), the new body created by merging the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Office for Fair Access — one of 15 people! But the Guardian’s spin was enough to ruin many people’s New Year’s Eve, or so they claimed on Twitter.

It has been a good year for the girls. The filly Enable was the horse of the year, winning not only the Oaks, amid a thunderstorm, but also collecting the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot, and the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe in Paris, in scintillating style. Jessica Harrington trained the Cheltenham Gold Cup winner Sizing John, and Josephine Gordon became only the second woman ever, after Hayley Turner, to ride 100 winners in a calendar year. I have been banging on for 20 years about giving women riders more opportunities, but even so I was surprised to discover, when researching Sixty Years of Jump Racing with former Cheltenham impresario Edward Gillespie, just how deep some prejudices ran.

Spotting Mark Grant’s name on an Ascot racecard, I remembered a dashing young mop-haired rider I first encountered some years back as stable jockey to the splendid Andy Turnell, with whom I once shared a syndicate horse. Since that first meeting, Mark has not become a household name. Last season he had only 82 rides and produced just four winners. Since April 2013, he has won only 13 hurdles and 14 chases from 564 rides. But here was Mark, hairline receding yet enthusiasm undimmed, riding Count Meribel for the all-conquering Nigel Twiston-Davies stable in a novice hurdle. He rode him well, too, getting the four-year-old into a nice rhythm for a convincing victory that completed a hat trick for the pair after two earlier victories at Carlisle.

I’m writing this on the easyJet flight back from Marrakech, where I have just spent a long weekend as a house guest of Rachel Johnson. She had managed to secure a marvellous villa by the name of Ezzahra, about a 20-minute drive from the airport, complete with a pool, spa and paddle tennis court. There were 12 of us in all, five couples and two men travelling solo — Harry Mount, the editor of the Oldie, and Mark Palmer, the travel editor of the Daily Mail. Harry, Mark and I quickly discovered we were the only Leavers in a nest of die-hard Remainers. Now, it will not come as news to Spectator readers that the result of last year’s referendum has left some pro-Europeans feeling a teensy-weensy bit annoyed.

Richard Johnson may already have 100 winners in the bag, and Paul Nicholls may already have banked £750,000 worth of prize money for his owners, but for most racing fans Cheltenham’s November meeting marks the start of the true jumping season. There was a moment last Saturday, as the incessant rain — one that found a Barbour no impediment — soaked through my shirt, my boots proved as waterproof as cardboard and my racecard notes dissolved to soggy tissue, when I pondered whether it might have been wiser to be addicted to a warmer, drier sport: women’s beach volleyball, perhaps. But it was a brief moment.

Crikey Moses! Stanley Johnson has been cast as the token pensioner in the new series of I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! At 77, he will be 27 years older than the next oldest person in the jungle-based reality show, 50-year-old ex-footballer Dennis Wise. He cheerfully admits he has never watched the programme before, which comes as no surprise. If he had known what he was letting himself in for, would he have signed up? I don’t just mean the routine indignities, such as chewing on turkey testicles or washing down a plate of live cockroaches with a beaker of blended emu liver. Or the discomfort of enduring a three-week camping holiday in an inhospitable environment with few mod cons and not enough food.

Imagine Ryan Moore getting caught on the line by a rival’s late spurt at the end of a Newmarket race and being so upset that he goes to bed without supper, crying like a baby. Then imagine him offering to recompense the owner personally for his lost bets. That is how the popular George Fordham, champion jockey 14 times between 1855 and 1871, behaved after losing that way in 1962. Famed for his scrupulous honesty in the days when racing was riddled with corruption, Fordham has attracted less attention than his younger rival Fred Archer, known as ‘the Tin Man’ for his relentless pursuit of money. But when the two of them met in the two-horse matches that were common at the time, it was Fordham ‘the Demon’ who regularly came out on top.

I had the unusual experience last Sunday of appearing on a panel to defend free speech having been the victim of censorship 24 hours earlier. As Claire Fox, the chair of the event, said: ‘We are lucky enough to have our very own free speech martyr on the panel.’ Martyr is putting it a bit strongly, but I was ‘no platformed’ as a result of expressing a verboten point of view. What made it quite upsetting is that the organisation responsible was Teach First, an education charity that aims to recruit top university graduates into teaching and which I have always supported.

Racing’s finances depend on as many people as possible betting, so it seemed a touch ironic that Responsible Gambling Awareness Week coincided with Ascot’s glorious British Champions Day, a day that showcased almost everything good the sport has to offer. The Irish genius Aidan O’Brien duly equalled the world record of 25 Group One wins in a season with Hydrangea capturing the Fillies and Mares Stakes. The long-striding Cracksman’s demolition of the Champion Stakes field provided the first Group One victory in Europe by a horse sired by Frankel. Racing’s cheerleader Frankie Dettori celebrated with his trademark flying dismount from both Cracksman and the grey filly Persuasive, on whom he swooped to victory in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes.

I am currently wrestling with a dilemma. I have agreed to contribute to a panel discussion on character education at University College London, and while I generally applaud schools that try to inculcate qualities like perseverance, resilience, the ability to defer gratification, etc, I am not entirely convinced that these virtues can be taught. Should I swallow my scepticism, or gently point out that it’s naive to expect schools to achieve much in this area? The panel will be discussing an essay in a periodical called Impact in which philosophers write about education policy. This essay by Randall Curren, a professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester, New York, strikes some pleasingly conservative notes.

 Chicago ‘Write drunk, edit sober,’ Ernest Hemingway reportedly said, and Oak Park, on the leafy outskirts of Chicago, is the place where he became a writer (the drink came later). Here is the clapboard house where he was born, and learned to read and write, and a few blocks away is the home where his father blew his brains out in 1928, just as his son would do 33 years later. Violence is ever present in Chicago, even in affluent Oak Park, but despite its reputation (or maybe, in a way, because of it) this is an intensely literary city, and a fitting location for the new American Writers Museum.