Toby Young

I’m trying to organise an event in Westminster with the journalist Isabel Oakeshott and it’s proving a bit of a nightmare. So many obstacles have been thrown in our way that we’re beginning to think it might be jinxed. But we aren’t about to give up. The original idea was for the two of us to have a conversation on stage in front of a live audience about Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. These are the messages – more than 100,000 in total, between the then health secretary and various politicians, civil servants and advisers – that he shared with Isabel when she was employed to ghost-write The Pandemic Diaries, Hancock’s memoir about the crisis.

I was in Canada last week, travelling across British Columbia on a luxury train called the Rocky Mountaineer. It was great. The downside was I had to travel to North America and back in five days, meaning that as soon as my body clock had adjusted to the time difference I was back in England. So I was feeling a bit discombobulated when I set off on a road trip to Stoke-on-Trent with my three sons on Saturday morning. Our first reason for making the journey was to see QPR’s penultimate match of the 2022-23 season against Stoke City, a must-win game for us. We’ve performed so badly since October that only four points separated us from the relegation zone, meaning we needed three from this game or the next to guarantee our survival.

As another summer approaches, I’ve embarked on yet another attempt to lose weight. You’d have thought I’d have learnt my lesson by now – what goes down, must come up – but it turns out yo-yo dieting is actually good for you. At least, that’s the conclusion of a team of researchers at Oxford University who analysed 124 trials involving 50,000 people trying to lose weight. They lost an average of between five and ten pounds and regained it at a rate of less than a pound a year. According to Professor Susan Jebb, co-author of the study, it took the participants in the study between five and 14 years to put the weight back on, during which time their blood pressure, blood glucose and cholesterol levels were all lower, thereby reducing their risk of diabetes and heart disease.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that six police officers raided a pub in Essex after a customer complained about the presence of 15 golliwogs on display behind the bar. After placing the dolls in evidence bags, the officers told the pub’s owner that they were investigating a possible ‘hate crime’. Needless to say, you’re lucky to get a visit from a single officer if you report a burglary in Essex, let alone six. In 2018-19, just 5 per cent of residential burglaries reported to Essex police resulted in someone being charged or summoned to court. It appears that the only way to get a full complement of officers to investigate a crime – not just in Essex, but anywhere – is to report it as a ‘hate crime’.

For me, one of the joys of going abroad is bargaining with the local sellers. They name an extortionate price; I make an insulting counteroffer; they threaten to walk away; I increase my offer by a fractional amount; they accuse me of not being serious, then name a price that’s fractionally lower than their opening bid, accompanied by elaborate hand gestures to indicate this is their absolute final offer; now it’s my turn to start walking away; and so on, until eventually we arrive at a mutually agreeable price that leaves us both feeling we’ve got the better of one another. In reality, of course, I’ve been ripped off, but I can tell myself I’ve struck a tremendous bargain. Unfortunately, Caroline takes a different view.

The teaching unions never let a good crisis go to waste. Following the tragic death of Ruth Perry, the headteacher of Caversham Primary School in Reading, who took her own life after Ofsted told her it was going to downgrade her school from ‘Outstanding’ to ‘Inadequate’, the NEU has called for the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills to be replaced by a body that’s ‘supportive, effective and fair’. As the co-founder of four free schools, I feel ambivalent about Ofsted. On the one hand, Ofsted has been kind to my schools, ranking three of them ‘Outstanding’ and one of them ‘Good’. But on the other, there isn’t much correlation between how pupils perform and a school’s Ofsted rating.

On Monday, a bill was passed by the National Assembly in France that will give courts the power to prevent parents posting pictures or videos of their kids online. The courts will decide, based on the child’s age and maturity, if the consent of both parents is needed, or whether the child’s approval is sufficient. In certain circumstances, if posting the image ‘seriously affects the child’s dignity or moral integrity’, not even the consent of both parents will be enough. The proposer of the bill, Bruno Studer, says the new law is intended to show young people that their parents don’t have an ‘absolute right’ over their image. I feel ambivalent about this.

On Monday, Suella Braverman published draft guidance designed to rein in the police habit of recording a ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI) against a person’s name whenever someone accuses them of doing something politically incorrect. You may think I’m exaggerating, but in 2017 an NCHI was recorded against Amber Rudd, then the home secretary, after an Oxford professor complained about her references to ‘migrant workers’ in a Tory party conference speech. NCHIs can show up on an enhanced criminal record check even though, by definition, the person hasn’t committed a crime.

The problem with being a film collector is that the technology on which films are preserved keeps changing. I’m not talking about abandoning my DVD library – although I’ll come to that – but my collection of LaserDiscs. LaserDiscs were a forerunner of DVDs. They were the same size as LPs and you often needed two to capture a long film like Spartacus. The quality was significantly better than VHS and I held screening parties at my flat in Shepherd’s Bush for films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day. I thought the fact that hardly anyone else had the technology was part of its appeal. But the failure of the format to take off in Europe meant it was quickly killed by the more affordable DVDs when they went on sale 25 years ago this month.

I’m currently sitting on top of a brownie point mountain. Caroline has departed for a two-week tennis freebie in Barbados, leaving me holding the fort. I have three teenage boys to take care of and a very small dog. That means getting them up for school every morning, emptying and loading the dishwasher, walking the dog, doing quite unbelievable amounts of washing, and preparing endless meals. I don’t know how she does it! Mali spends her days watching the front door, hoping to see a suntanned woman with a tennis racket To be fair, she doesn’t do it all, because I usually do some of it. And while she has a job, it’s only part-time, whereas I spend at least 60 hours a week doing paid work. So having to combine that with being a house husband is killing me.

James Delingpole and I had a blazing row on our weekly podcast on Monday. We were discussing the recent departure of Mark Steyn from GB News following a bust-up over his contract. Mark has been hosting a show on the channel for over a year, but took a break in December after suffering two heart attacks. When he was ready to return last month, GB News asked him to sign a contract which would have made his company liable for any fines imposed by Ofcom as a result of a ‘regulatory breach’ unless he and his producers agreed to ‘incorporate Ofcom regulatory input’ into the show. He refused and accused GB News of presenting him with a fait accompli that he couldn’t accept.

Some readers will recall the furore five years ago about the Presidents Club charity dinner at the Dorchester. The Financial Times sent two undercover journalists to work as ‘hostesses’ at the annual fundraiser and their report made uncomfortable reading for the big hitters in attendance, including Nadhim Zahawi. It was not just a men-only event, but the 130 hostesses were instructed to wear skimpy black outfits with matching underwear, and several were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned at a party following the dinner. In the ensuing scandal, the co-chairman resigned as a non-executive director of the Department for Education and one guest was removed from the Labour front bench in the Lords.