Toby Young

Rishi Sunak’s victory is a testament to how much progress we have made on the equalities front. As recently as 25 years ago, someone with his characteristics could never have become prime minister. Yet in today’s Britain, being a member of an historically disadvantaged minority is no impediment to success. I’m thinking, of course, of his height. As one wag joked on Twitter, the shortest-serving prime minister in British history has been succeeded by the shortest serving prime minister in British history. As a vertically challenged man myself, I take great comfort from this. Positive role models are few and far between in the modern world. In film and television there are the two Toms – Cruise and Hollander – but let’s face it, most successful leading men are tall.

I had a bicycle accident last week. Not terrible, but not great either. Of the five I’ve had since I took up cycling more than 20 years ago, it ranked third. No stitches needed,unlike the worst, which required more than 50 and a night in hospital. I didn’t bother with A&E this time, in spite of concerned onlookers advising me to. I think it looked worse than it was. Head injuries generally do because there’s so much blood. I’m slightly wary writing about this because I don’t want to give the anti-motorist lobby any more ammo. In fact, there were no other vehicles involved. The accident was actually caused by the front wheel of my bike hitting one of those kerbs in the middle of the road designed to stop cars drifting into cycle lanes.

Dan Schulman, the president and CEO of PayPal, gave an interview earlier this year entitled: ‘The thing that separates good companies from great ones: trust.’ He told the audience that companies need to do more than deliver an outstanding product to build trust. In addition, they need to ‘stand up for social issues that are important’ and ‘do the right things to help create a better world’. Ironically, it is precisely because PayPal has been energetically pursuing this agenda that trust in the company is beginning to evaporate.

Once the dust has settled over the government’s mini-Budget, another big political battle looms: the Online Safety Bill. This is the legislation that will make Ofcom responsible for regulating the internet so Britain becomes ‘the safest place in the world to go online’ – at least, that’s how the last government tried to sell it. It was due to go the House of Lords for a second reading in July, but was put on hold because of the Tory leadership contest and I was hoping it would never be resuscitated. Liz Truss and her lieutenants are currently going through the last administration’s legislative programme, seeing what they can ditch to free up some parliamentary time for new bills.

I’ve agreed to interview the author and journalist Andrew Doyle about his new book at the Conservative party conference – on stage, no less – so I thought I’d better read it. It’s about the inexorable rise of the social justice warriors, whom he regards as a danger to the survival of free speech and, by extension, the institutions and traditions that our liberal democracy depends on. My first reaction was one of irritation. The book is called The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World and it’s annoyingly similar to the title of a book I’ve been working on – Salem 2.0:the Return of the Religious Police to the Public Square.

One of the most regrettable trends of the past few decades is the creep of politics into every aspect of our public life. Institutions tasked with preserving our heritage, such as Tate Britain, Kew Gardens and the National Trust, are busy holding themselves to account for their historic links to slavery and colonialism, while the police, the civil service and the Church of England have embraced the mantra of equity, diversity and inclusion. The people in charge of these organisations – liberal, urban, highly educated – don’t think of these values as politically contentious, while those of us who don’t fall into those categories – probably the majority of the population – cannot help but feel alienated and disenfranchised.

I went to the O2 on Sunday night to see the comedians Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock. Chappelle, who survived an attempt to cancel him last year, didn’t disappoint, delivering some hilarious, politically incorrect jokes, and Rock was equally seditious, although his set went on for too long. But the rest of the evening was pretty painful. The effort it takes to get to this relic of the New Labour era is truly Herculean. Indeed, Rock made a joke about it, claiming he’d set off from his hotel on Wednesday morning and only just arrived. The Tube station is North Greenwich, one beyond Canary Wharf, and your only hope of getting there in less than 90 minutes from west London is via jet ski along the Thames.

Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers across the world have successfully promoted a series of controversial public policies by claiming they’re based on ‘the science’ rather than a particular moral or ideological vision. I’m thinking of lockdowns and net zero in particular. Yet at the same time, this group has engaged in behaviour that has undermined public confidence in science. Why appeal to the authority of science to win support for a series of politically contentious policies – and then diminish its authority? Take Anthony Fauci, for instance, who recently announced he’s stepping down as chief medical adviser to Joe Biden.

As a defender of free speech, I’m used to taking up the cudgels on behalf of unsavoury people. To quote Lord Justice Sedley in a famous High Court judgment in 1999, ‘Freedom of speech includes not only the inoffensive but the irritating, the contentious, the eccentric, the heretical, the unwelcome and the provocative, provided it does not tend to provoke violence.’ But the case of Graham Phillips, who was sanctioned by the British government last month, is one of the hardest I’ve ever had to wrestle with. Phillips styles himself an ‘independent journalist’, but it’s far from clear that the additional free-speech protections we apply to journalists should be extended to him. It would be more accurate to describe him as a pro-Russian propagandist.

I made my way to Loftus Road on Saturday for QPR’s first home fixture of the season. We’ve got a new gaffer in the form of Michael Beale, a 41-year-old Englishman who’s never managed a football club before but has worked as an assistant coach at San Paulo in Brazil and as Steven Gerrard’s right-hand at Rangers and Aston Villa. Can he make the transition from a bibs-and-cones man to a full-blown manager? I worry that QPR have brought him in because (a) he’s cheap and (b) won’t make a fuss about the club’s efforts to cut costs. Since the end of the last season, we’ve let go of 13 players and only brought in four, reducing the size of the squad by nearly a third. That will have cut the wage bill, but won’t do much for our prospects.

I’m currently on holiday in Iceland. I say ‘holiday’, but I’m with my three teenage sons so it’s more like being a supply teacher on a school trip. The scenery looks like a series of illustrations in a geography textbook – volcano, tectonic plate, glacier – but so far the boys aren’t impressed. ‘Every day is the same,’ said 17-year-old Ludo. ‘We wake up, drive somewhere, go on a walk, take pictures of a waterfall or a lava field, then walk back again.’ This produced murmurs of agreement. I told them they’d enjoy the sightseeing more if they looked up from their phones occasionally, but I don’t think this cut through.

The latest heatwave reminded me of my brief career as a marijuana farmer. This wasn’t in the summer of 1976, when I was 13, but three years later, by which time my family had moved to Devon. My father had been commissioned to write the biography of Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, the founders of Dartington Hall, a utopian community in South Devon, and wanted to be nearer the archives and the couples’ friends and colleagues whom he was planning to interview. Having been brought up in London, I was terrifically snobbish about how behind the times the local teenagers were – still wearing flares and listening to Status Quo, gawd help them! But at least the house we’d bought came with a tiny bit of land. That meant I could cultivate my own cannabis plantation.

Have we reached peak woke? In Hollywood, that seems to be the emerging consensus. Thanks to the box office success of Top Gun: Maverick and the disappointing performance of Pixar’s Lightyear, in which Buzz Lightyear’s commanding officer is a black lesbian, the studios think audiences may be tiring of being lectured to. The same is true of the streaming platforms, with the biggest hits of the year being shows that take the mickey out of corporate virtue-signalling (The Boys) or just celebrate old-fashioned American heroism (The Terminal List).