Toby Young

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 After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing the amendment was withdrawn, but only because the government had agreed to do it.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.

As the author of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, I have to acknowledge that I still have some way to go to match the radioactive negativity Harry and Meghan generate with their every move. The Sussexes’ accumulated expertise in committing increasingly nauseating acts of hypocritical entitlement with every week that passes should qualify them both for a Regius Chair in Blithe Privilege at the University of Self-Regard. The latest episode in their narcissistic odyssey – The Sillyad – has been their agonising over where to send their children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, to school. Harry and Meghan’s decision to educate them in England is, in its way, admirable.

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.

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.