No sacred cows

Is demand for the water of life running dry? I’ve just returned from a trip to Islay in Scotland, which has more whisky distilleries per square mile than anywhere else in the UK, and several of its famous single malts are struggling. Suntory, which owns Bowmore and Laphroaig, announced in February that it was merging the staff of the two brands, with Bowmore ceasing production until the end of the year, and Laphroaig putting its planned expansion on hold. Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s recently dropped the price of a bottle of eight-year-old Lagavulin to £40, down from its recommended retail price of £52.50. Are we in the foothills of a global whisky recession? Alice from the Lagavulin visitors’ centre, who took Caroline and me on a tour on Sunday morning, seemed fairly bullish.

When I read that Sandi Toksvig, the television presenter, is raising money for an alternative to Wikipedia, my heart soared. It’s ‘deeply biased’, she told the Cheltenham Literature Festival, explaining that her new version – to be called Mappa Mundi – would be produced in collaboration with Cambridge University. It would be ‘a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted’, she said. She’s absolutely right. Wikipedia has long suffered from a left-wing bias, something documented at length in a report by David Rozado for the Manhattan Institute in 2024.

Back in January, I voted for a Conservative amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to restrict social media access for under-16s. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing the amendment was withdrawn, but only because the government had agreed to do it. Now that Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, has announced she’s going to get on with it, I’m beginning to have second thoughts. I had persuaded myself that it would mean fewer restrictions for adult users, given that the most persuasive argument for censoring social media is to protect children from harm. But in retrospect that was naive.

Earlier this week, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Cairngorms National Park to go deer stalking, an activity I was introduced to in the 1990s and quickly fell in love with. There are few better feelings than seeing a stag in your rifle’s telescopic sight, his antlers silhouetted against the skyline, having stalked the beast for several hours, much of it on your belly. It’s a challenging sport and not just because of the physical discomfort. Red deer can see, hear and smell you from thousands of yards away, so there’s no alternative but to sneak up on them downwind.

One of the drawbacks of being a Tory peer is that when I’m asked to give a talk or participate in a debate I’m no longer offered a fee. Before I was ennobled, I could expect some honorarium, even if it was a cursory amount. But as a Conservative ‘politician’, I’m supposed to be grateful for any opportunity to thump the tub. So I almost always say no. But I agreed to speak in a debate at the Edinburgh Union because my youngest son is due to go to the university next year and I thought it would be a good opportunity for a father-and-son trip as well as a chance to introduce him to the city. I also wanted to support the Union, which, in spite of dating back to 1889, stopped prioritising regular debates after becoming the Edinburgh University Students’ Association in the 1970s.

Thirty-five years ago this month, I launched a magazine with Julie Burchill and Cosmo Landesman that, despite going belly up four years later, had quite an impact. The Modern Review, edited by me, published long, scholarly articles about icons of 1990s pop culture like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Spice Girls and Noel Edmonds – our motto was: ‘Low culture for highbrows.’ Today that doesn’t sound particularly remarkable, but such material was then considered below the salt and insofar as the broadsheets covered it at all, was the object of humorous disdain. The fact that mass culture is now taken more seriously by critics – too seriously, some would say – is partly due to the influence of the Modern Review.

In case you were in any doubt that Cambridge University’s ‘independent review’ into the Jason Arday affair will blame the media for his death, the appointment of Nazir Afzal OBE as chair confirms it. The former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England is no friend of press freedom. ‘Hate Speech is NOT Free Speech,’ he tweeted in 2024. It’s a racing certainty that his report will spare the blushes of the Cambridge authorities and call for a public inquiry into Britain’s out-of-control newspapers and magazines. ‘I do not shy away from using the terms “institutional racism”, “institutional misogyny” and “institutional homophobia”,’ he told MPs after his independent review of the London Fire Brigade in 2024.

I have a suggestion for those opposed to Project Spire, the Church of England’s plan to put £100 million into an investment fund to benefit those communities ‘affected by historic slavery’. Bear in mind that none of the arguments against it has had an impact to date. Suggesting that this money would be better spent repairing roofs and stained-glass windows has left the Church Commissioners unmoved. Trying to assuage their guilt by pointing out that the Church’s financial investment in the transatlantic slave trade was negligible – and yielded a loss, not a profit – also falls on deaf ears. So why not club together and pay for a trip to Zanzibar instead?

It has become a summer ritual for the Young family to attend the annual tennis tournament in Hunstanton, a Victorian seaside town in Norfolk. Normally a minor stop on the amateur circuit, it was elevated to number three in the county earlier this year on account of the quality of its grass courts. For some reason, they have suffered less than most from the drought, although they looked pretty threadbare to me. Separately, it is graded 5/6 by the LTA. About ten years ago, Caroline entered the ladies’ doubles and, because she was partnered by her tennis coach, took home a cup. It’s been downhill ever since, with the young Youngs making less progress each year as they’re forced to compete in older categories.

Should I regret writing a satirical piece for this magazine about Jason Arday? Yes, according to those who blame the ‘right-wing media’ for his death. A petition started by Jolyon Maugham this week calling for a public inquiry into the ‘press harassment’ of Arday has gained more than 100,000 signatures. A letter from Dawn Butler MP to Ipso urges the independent press regulator to use ‘every available lever’ to take ‘decisive action’ against the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator. Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, has named me as a particularly egregious offender, while the novelist Will Self has called for the journalists who exposed Arday’s wrongdoing to be prosecuted.

My father, Michael, who was a sociologist among other things, was once asked by a drug company to do some market research into a pill it was developing that could change skin colour from black to white. The company hoped it might go some way to tackling racial prejudice. After Michael interviewed some prospective customers in south London, he concluded there wouldn’t be much demand. The problem, they told him, was that it would leave their features unchanged so they’d end up looking like albinos – and there was no reason to think they’d experience any less racism. On balance, they’d prefer to remain as they were. As a bald man, I’ve always felt the same way about hair transplants.

I remember being in The Spectator’s offices on a Tuesday afternoon not long ago when I noticed a group of staffers clustered round a computer screen. One let out a guffaw of laughter, followed by another, then another. People sitting nearby demanded to know what was so funny and someone started reading it out. Before long, the entire room was roaring with laughter – proper, hysterical, uncontrollable laughter. Rod Liddle had filed his column. I was envious, obviously, but also laughing with everybody else. Rod was one of those writers it was impossible to dislike, however successful he became, because reading him gave you so much pleasure. That was true even if you didn’t share his politics, provided you had a sense of humour.

There was something surreal about my visit to La Cité du Vin, Bordeaux’s wine museum, last Saturday. From the top floor, with its panoramic view of the city, you could see the smoke from the Gironde wildfire turning the sky yellow, yet none of the staff seemed remotely concerned. This was in spite of the fact that the conflagration had already triggered France’s largest evacuation since the second world war and was getting closer to Bordeaux every hour. OK, maybe they thought it unlikely they’d be asked to leave their homes, but weren’t they worried about the region’s vineyards? These people worked at a museum dedicated to celebrating wine, for Christ’s sake.

When Steve Reed, the now ex-communities secretary, unveiled his social cohesion ‘action plan’ earlier this year, he promised to publish an ‘evidence review’ on ‘the impacts of misinformation’. Commissioned by the government’s chief scientific adviser, it would focus on ‘how to measure the problem, assess harms and counter and mitigate these harms’. That report has now been published and the headline finding is that ‘anti-LGBTQ+ narratives’ – such as claiming that state schools and other public authorities have been captured by gender ideology, and questioning whether biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports – are examples of misleading and false information that cause harm, alongside climate denial and deepfake images.

Last week I watched a clip of Ian Wright explaining why it meant so much to him, as a black former player, that Jude Bellingham is uninhibited about revelling in his achievements. In the past, he said, some black players had been criticised for being too cocky, as though they’d forgotten their place. So he was pleased that it is now completely acceptable for a black player to strut around with a bit of swagger. I can see his point, but I also thought: why do you have to racialise this remarkable young player? Can’t we just celebrate him as an Englishman? England’s progress in the World Cup is one of those moments in which we’re supposed to set our differences aside and come together.

The problem with being a well-known climate sceptic is that whenever there’s a heatwave, you get buttonholed by eco-zealots who think it ‘proves’ they’re right and you’re wrong. The first person to confront me during the current sunny spell was a Guardian journalist at a right-wing conference, which the newspaper had clearly identified as a hotbed of ‘denialism’. It didn’t help that the air conditioning wasn’t working and it was approaching 40°C in the main auditorium. ‘I see you’re sweating profusely,’ he began, shoving a microphone in my face. ‘Still think climate change is a hoax?’ I had to patiently explain that few people on my side of this debate deny that climate change is real.

Just when you think this government cannot get any madder, it publishes a truly mental green paper. Called ‘Watch this Space’ and produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, it suggests forcing social media platforms to make content produced by public-service media providers, like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, ‘prominent and easily discoverable’. So, if you search for an instructional video on YouTube about how to do the foxtrot, it would steer you towards an episode of Strictly Come Dancing. And the content recommended for you by a platform’s algorithm wouldn’t be based on your personal preferences, but on what DCMS – or possibly Ofcom, the details are vague – thinks you ought to be consuming.

My son Charlie sat his final A-level paper last week and the significance of this has only just sunk in. It’s not simply that he has finished his schooling; he’s the last of my children to do so. No more PTA meetings, no more parents’ evenings, no more school runs. My kids are all grown up. I’ve fulfilled my biological duty, raising four of them to adulthood, and can now disappear over the horizon into the sunset – or, rather, the Sunset Care Home. This is particularly poignant as I helped set up the school my children went to. Between 2009 and 2011, I led a small group of parents and volunteers who founded the first free school to sign a funding agreement with Michael Gove, then the education secretary.

The problem with my gambling, Caroline has always maintained, is not the fact that I nearly always lose. I only ever bet on QPR, so that’s inevitable. No, the issue is that I might pass on the habit to my children, particularly the boys. My bets rarely exceed £25, but my sons might have less self control. What if they become addicts, she wants to know? It will ruin their lives. In her eyes, gambling in front of them is like snorting heroin off the kitchen table. Well, it pains me to say it, but she was right. My youngest recently celebrated his 18th birthday and the first thing he did, at one minute after midnight, was open a bet365 account. The fact that his becoming an adult coincided with the start of the World Cup didn’t help.

Like many people, I’ve been bemoaning the woke capture of our security services for some time. In 2024, Sir Richard Moore, then the head of MI6, resigned from the Garrick Club during the row over the admission of women, and earlier this year it emerged MI5 was excluding white people from registering interest for administrative roles due to the ‘under-representation’ of black, Asian and minority ethnic people. You would hope the recruitment of spies would be based on merit, given the vital role they play in protecting the national interest, but apparently diversity targets are more important.