Toby Young

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On Monday, Suella Braverman published draft guidance designed to rein in the police habit of recording a ‘non-crime hate incident’ (NCHI) against a person’s name whenever someone accuses them of doing something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.

About six months ago I was contacted by Big Brother Watch, the civil liberties campaign group, and asked if I wanted to help with an investigation into the surveillance of critics of the government’s pandemic response by state agencies. Would I submit subject access requests to different Whitehall departments to see if I was among the critics of the government’s pandemic response who’d been monitored by the Counter Disinformation Unit, the Rapid Response Unit, the Intelligence and Communications Unit and the 77th Brigade? I thought it unlikely, but decided to play along and on Monday night Big Brother Watch published its report revealing that I was one of the dozens of journalists, scientists and MPs who’d been spied on in this way.

Last week, the Office for National Statistics published the data on gender identity in England and Wales, as revealed in the latest UK census. For the first time ever, the census included the following question: ‘Is the gender you identify with the same as your sex registered at birth?’ This was asked of those aged 16 and over and 45.7 million people, about 94 per cent of the total, answered. In total, 45.4 million (93.5 per cent) answered yes and 262,000 (0.5 per cent) answered no. The lobby group Stonewall welcomed the news. ‘It’s incredible to see the true size of the LGBTQ+ community,’ it tweeted. But it must have come as something of a blow, since Stonewall had previously said the size of the country’s trans and non-binary population is 600,000.

When I imagine the perfect Christmas lunch, I think of the end of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge turns up unexpectedly at his nephew’s house and discovers a warm family gathering: ‘Nothing could be heartier… Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!’ I can picture myself as an old man, parked in front of the telly wearing a Christmas hat, as Caroline creeps out to the neighbours’ drinks Back in my youth, the Christmas lunches hosted by my father, while not exactly hearty, were opportunities to get together with my extended family – my three half-siblings, my mother and sister, my grandmother Edith, an old friend of my father’s called Vincent.

According to a quote in a recent article by the environment editor of the Times, I’m ‘the most prominent UK public figure’ whose posts on Twitter related to ‘climate scepticism’ are ‘heavily shared’. This was based on an analysis commissioned by the paper from two researchers at the University of London, Max Falkenberg and Andrea Baronchelli. Apparently, ten Twitter handles account for 25 per cent of the most widely shared sceptical tweets – and mine is one of them! Why are the people who sign up to the green agenda so quick to label those who don’t as ‘deniers’?