Toby Young

Are congratulations in order for Sacha Baron Cohen? The more I read about Jason Arday, the Cambridge sociology professor and DEI poster boy caught up in a plagiarism row, the more convinced I am he’s the comedian's greatest creation.  Arday’s academic career, like his athletic achievements, reads like a fairy tale First, there's the over-the-top back story. He claimed to have been totally mute until the age of 11 – having been diagnosed with autism – and unable to read or write until he was 18. Yet in spite of these disadvantages, he earned a PhD by the time he was 30 – which he managed to complete while suffering from a brain tumour! On the face of it, utterly incredible.

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.

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 big revelation in Lord Ashcroft’s forthcoming biography of Nigel Farage is that he’s been banned from Desert Island Discs. According to Ashcroft’s sources, an appearance by the Reform UK leader would make some BBC employees feel ‘unsafe’ and might lead to other high-profile figures boycotting the long-running show. ‘I have come to expect nothing less from the BBC,’ Farage told the Mail on Sunday. ‘Their blatant bias has been obvious for years.’ The BBC has categorically denied the story and, in fairness, its ‘blatant bias’ doesn’t extend to Question Time, which Farage has appeared on about 40 times in the past 26 years.

I’ve spent the last few days composing a response to the government’s consultation on whether to introduce a statutory minimum age for sites like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. The consultation, announced on 19 January, was intended to spike the guns of Lord Nash, a Conservative peer who’d proposed an amendment to the Schools Bill banning under-16s from social media. It didn’t work and his amendment was carried two days later, although he was later persuaded to withdraw it after the government tabled its own amendment pledging to impose some kind of ban regardless.

How worried should we be about AI? Absolutely petrified, according to a new documentary called Chasing Utopia. Billed as the Inconvenient Truth of the digital age, it’s a shop window for the alarmist predictions of Mo Gawdat, a former chief business officer at Google X who’s reinvented himself as the Al Gore of AI. The filmmakers follow him on a global speaking tour, delivering the same TED talk to interchangeable groups of credulous young people. ‘Beware!’ is his message. If we don’t rapidly change course, we’ll soon be at the mercy of a superior alien intelligence that sees humans in much the same way we view chimpanzees. I don’t buy it – partly because I think we’re a long way from artificial general intelligence, let alone artificial superintelligence.

At the time of writing, I haven’t seen the King’s Speech, but it’s a safe bet it will include a bill to enable wayward peers to be stripped of their titles. The point, of course, is so that Keir Starmer, if he’s still PM by then, can show us just how much he loathes Peter Mandelson. It’s the equivalent of Loyalists after the Restoration exhuming Cromwell’s corpse so they could ‘execute’ him and stick his head on a spike in Westminster Hall. But because Mandelson hasn’t been found guilty of a crime – and is unlikely to be – the bar for removing a title will have to be quite low. It will inevitably be some version of ‘bringing the Lords into disrepute’.

What is the greatest threat to British democracy? Zack Polanski’s call for ‘building a society’ that ‘doesn’t include’ people who ‘identify as right-wing’? Labour’s efforts to flood the Upper House with party apparatchiks? Islamist extremism? The correct answer is Reform UK. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new book called What If Reform Wins by the Times reporter Peter Chappell. Before I get to its flaws, I should acknowledge it’s an enjoyable read, with plenty of deft, comic touches. It imagines that Reform wins a majority in June 2029, and then gives a blow-by-blow account of the constitutional crisis that follows, with the informal rules and conventions underpinning our democracy being stress-tested and found wanting.

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian published an article entitled: ‘“I feel like I’m losing her”: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right’. It was full of heart-rending tales from metropolitan liberals about how their dim-witted parents had been duped into believing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories by following people like Rupert Lowe on social media. One particularly exasperated man suggested a course of therapy for his mother, fearing that she might want to join Reform. But is it really the online radicalisation of elderly parents that’s putting families under pressure in the run-up to the local elections? I suspect it has more to do with their children, particularly their daughters, embracing a toxic strain of identity politics imported from America.

The American dream is dying, according to the Times. To mark the US’s 250th anniversary, the paper commissioned YouGov to explore whether the country’s citizens still believe that if you ‘work hard and play by the rules’ you will eventually be successful. Turns out, only 38 per cent of the respondents think this applies to all Americans, while 59 per cent think the American dream is now less attainable than it was when they were growing up. In addition, 38 per cent rated today’s quality of life as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’, compared with 60 per cent who said the same about 1976, the bicentennial year.

I was leaving the CNN presidential election night party at dawn in 2016, having celebrated Donald Trump’s victory, when Paul Staines, then the editor of Guido Fawkes, turned to me and asked: ‘Are we the baddies?’ This was a reference to a Mitchell and Webb sketch set during the second world war in which the question is asked by one Nazi of another. I assured him we were not, but it was a genuine moment of self-reflection on Paul’s part, not a joke. I don’t suppose Jolyon Maugham KC has ever been afflicted by such doubts, even after bludgeoning a fox to death with a baseball bat in 2019. Scarcely a week passes without the social justice warrior trying to drag someone into court or lodging an official complaint about them.