Toby Young

It had been billed as the most controversial debate of the year, with even Rishi Sunak intervening to say that Kathleen Stock, who had been invited to the Oxford Union, should not be no-platformed. But if you were sitting in the Union’s debating chamber on Tuesday evening – as I was – the huge kerfuffle seemed baffling. For an hour and a half, the former philosophy professor talked almost exclusively about toilets. To be fair, she was given little choice. It was more of an interview than a debate, in which the president of the union fired questions at her. Roughly 90 per cent of them were about women’s lavatories. In particular, he wanted to know why she objected to trans women being allowed to use ‘the ladies’.

I have a confession to make: I’m a sitzpinkler. That’s the German word for men who sit down when they pee, and it’s a bit of an insult – like calling someone a wimp or a ‘soy boy’. Real men do it standing up, apparently. But the reason there’s a German word for it is because the majority of Teutonic men prefer the sedentary position. According to a recent international survey, 62 per cent of German men said they usually or always sit down to pee, compared with 50 per cent of Swedes, 34 per cent of Italians and 23 per cent of Brits. It’s particularly true of older Germans – with just 9 per cent of men over 55 saying they stand up. There is even a bestselling book about the eccentricities of the Teutons called German Men Sit Down to Pee.

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.

A couple of years ago I thought seriously about buying an electric car. Not a hybrid, but the full monty. There was one in particular I liked the look of and I even contacted a dealership to ask whether they’d accept my diesel-powered VW Touran in part-exchange. The answer was yes, but it was still eye-wateringly expensive. Was it worth it? I tried to persuade myself it would be, given the savings on fuel costs, the waiving of the congestion charge, etc. Boy, am I glad I dodged that bullet. Scarcely a day passes without a new horror story about electric vehicles in the press.

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.

I was one of the first people to take up Elon Musk’s offer to purchase a blue tick, the Twitter equivalent of VIP status. Not because I didn’t have a complimentary one – I did, believe it or not – but because if you sign up to Twitter Blue it means you can post videos on the site that are longer than a couple of minutes. Poor Elon Musk then had to do a reverse ferret, announcing he’d be restoring the merit badges to a select few I had noticed that my friend Konstantin Kisin had put up a speech he’d made at the Oxford Union and it was getting lots of views. I spoke in the same debate and gave what I thought was a much better speech, so wanted to put mine on Twitter, hoping it would prove even more popular.

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’.

A dark cloud has descended over Queens Park Rangers, my beloved football club. On 22 October last year, when we beat Wigan Athletic 2-1 at home, we were top of the Championship table. Under our new manager, Michael Beale, we had won nine of our first 16 games, drawn three and lost four. Since then, it’s all gone Pete Tong – and not just a bit pear-shaped, but disastrously, catastrophically wrong. In the 23 games that followed, we have won twice, drawn six and lost 15, meaning we’ve only chalked up 12 points, the lowest tally in the division. We’re now just three points off the bottom three and look likely to be relegated. What in God’s name has happened?

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.

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.

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.