Toby Young

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).

Monday was the 150th anniversary of Speakers’ Corner and, in the hope of drumming up some publicity for the Free Speech Union, I went along to give a speech. Rather embarrassingly, I didn’t actually know where it was. I had been there once before, but that was about 40 years ago, and Google Maps wasn’t much help. Perhaps that was deliberate on the part of the censorious tech giant. You can imagine a group of woke nerds sitting around in Silicon Valley laughing at the prospect of a clueless culture warrior setting up his soapbox in the area they’ve wrongly identified as Speakers’ Corner, letting rip about illegal migrants, then getting hauled away by the Metropolitan Police. Not that being in the right location offers you much protection these days.

As the father of four children who will be entering higher education in the next few years, I’m worried that my home will shortly start to resemble a university campus. In other words, I’ll be forced to declare my preferred gender pronouns, the kitchen will be designated a ‘safe space’ and the collected works of J.K. Rowling will be burnt on the garden lawn. You may think I’m joking, but a new poll from the Higher Education Policy Institute lays bare just how thin-skinned today’s students are.

Last Saturday I went to the opera for only the second time in my life. This was at the invitation of David Ross, my former boss at the New Schools Network, who hosts an arts festival called Nevill Holt Opera at his house in Leicestershire every summer. Launched in 2013, it is now a mainstay of the summer season, with the festival lasting until the end of June. The two operas this year are La bohème and The Barber of Seville. Caroline and I were there to see the Puccini, but as anyone who’s attended an opera at a country house will tell you, the production itself is only part of the appeal. Guests are encouraged to arrive early so they can explore the gardens, and the tableau that greeted us when we got there at about 4.15 p.m.

For Christmas Caroline bought me a ‘Deluxe Gift Experience’ at Chapel Down, the UK’s leading winery. I say ‘me’, but it was actually a present for her too since it was a ‘couples’ package. For £490 we got a private tour of the vineyard, a wine--tasting session, dinner for two in the Chapel Down restaurant, an overnight stay at the Sissinghurst Castle B&B and free tickets to visit Sissinghurst gardens the following morning. We left it a little late to book and the only slot they had available was last weekend, presumably because it clashed with the Jubilee bank holiday.

I fancy myself as a bit of an oenophile and during the lockdowns, when my local branch of Majestic was forced to close, I joined The Wine Society and started buying wine from a variety of online sellers such as Vivino and Goedhuis & Co. The upshot is that I get three or four emails a day from these companies and have become an expert in deconstructing their sales patter. The common theme is to coddle the self--deception of the buyers that they aren’t full-blown alcoholics – heaven forfend! – but are obsessed with wine for some other, entirely respectable reason. For instance, Goedhuis is currently promoting a ‘platinum selection for the Jubilee weekend’ on the assumption that its customers are going to be hosting garden parties this bank holiday.

‘Apocalyptic’ food shortages, gas and electricity bills soaring, wages not keeping pace with inflation… it’s beginning to look like we’re heading for major outbreaks of civil unrest this summer. As a resident of the London Borough of Ealing, which witnessed some of the worst rioting in the capital in 2011, I’m getting a little concerned. Not for myself and my family, you understand, but for the muggers, car thieves and burglars who prey on the middle-class residents. Will they be all right? The educated bourgeoisie has developed an irrational fear of civilisational collapse, having been taught by books and films like The Road and Mad Max that gangs of marauding thugs will rule the roost in a post-apocalyptic universe.

Five years ago, I put my friend Nell Butler in touch with Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain’s most outspoken headmistress. I was hoping Nell, who runs a TV production company, would persuade Katharine to let ITV make a documentary about Michaela, the free school she opened in 2014 and which she’s led ever since. I was director of the New Schools Network at the time, a free schools charity, and was convinced there could be no better advertisement for the controversial educational policy. At the time, Michaela had yet to be inspected by Ofsted and didn’t have any exam results, but knowing Katharine as I do, and having visited the school a few times, I had no doubt it would succeed.

Simon Kuper’s Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK is a wonderful compendium of anecdotes about Oxford in the 1980s, one of the best of which concerns a lecture he attended by the Marxist theorist Terry Eagleton just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Eagleton dismisses the collapse of the communist regimes across Eastern Europe as a minor source of annoyance that has no bearing on the validity of his beliefs. A student on Kuper’s right takes notes throughout and at the conclusion of the lecture reads his summary: ‘Presumably ironic.

I welcome Jacob Rees-Mogg’s recent announcement that he intends to reignite David Cameron’s ‘bonfire of the quangos’ in his capacity as minister for government efficiency. I’m sure many Spectator readers will have a particular quango, or arm’s-length body, they’d like to incinerate and I hope they write to him with their suggestions. I’d like to nominate the College of Policing, which is responsible for overseeing the police in England and Wales. The college made headlines last weekend when it emerged that it had urged the 43 different forces to ‘decolonise’ their training materials in order to recruit a more diverse workforce.

Eighteen months ago, I wrote a column for this magazine saying I regretted having been such a Boris enthusiast for the past 40 years. As a lockdown sceptic, I was disillusioned by his role in the greatest interference in personal liberty in our history. Where was the mischievous, freedom-loving, Falstaffian character I’d grown to love? Oliver Hardy had turned into Oliver Cromwell. Mercifully, Roundhead Boris was a temporary aberration. Indeed, the furrowed-browed, finger-wagging Prime Minister of those endless Downing Street press briefings turned out to be just another act in the Covid pantomime, with the Boris of old making whoopee behind the scenes.

Normal families spend the Easter holidays by the seaside or in the Mediterranean. But not the Youngs. My three boys and I took advantage of the two-week break to criss-cross the country following Queens Park Rangers, going to Sheffield, Preston and Huddersfield. We lost 1-0 to Sheffield and 2-1 to Preston, but managed to draw 2-2 with Huddersfield, which made it a good day out by QPR’s recent standards. I’ve always enjoyed going to the occasional away game, but this season my sons and I have tried to go to as many as possible to compensate for the closure of football grounds during the pandemic.

It’s fairly commonplace for people to wonder what, if anything, they’ll be remembered for. I’m going to be 59 later this year, so it’s been preying on my mind. Will it be the self-deprecating memoir I wrote about failing to take Manhattan? The schools I helped set up? The Free Speech Union? The answer, I’m afraid, is none of the above. I’ve just received an email from Google that has conclusively answered this question – and it’s not good news. According to the email, I added a location to Google Maps on 4 October 2017 that has been viewed 24 million times. Now, I might take some satisfaction from this if the place in question was a charming, out-of-the-way pub or an historic building.

I’m not sure what to think about the BBC’s announcement that it wants a quarter of its staff to be from working-class backgrounds by 2027. On the one hand, I’m against hiring quotas of any kind and think every position should be filled by the person best qualified for the job. But on the other, if the BBC is going to have diversity targets – and fighting against them seems futile at this point – then this one seems better than most. The rationale for this quota, according to the BBC, is it wants its staff to ‘better reflect UK society’, but I’m not sure it will achieve that. The problem lies in the way the BBC has defined ‘working-class’.

As I’ve got older my tastes have generally become less refined. During my youth I dutifully slogged through Kafka, Camus and Sartre, but my current bedtime reading is Sharpe’s Trafalgar by Bernard Cornwell. With movies, I used to feel obliged to watch subtitled masterpieces like La Règle du jeu and Le Salaire de la Peur, but now I’m perfectly happy with the latest Marvel blockbuster. However, when it comes to food and wine, I’ve become more snobbish – insufferably so. My last meal on death row would be the twice-baked cheese soufflé from Le Gavroche washed down with a bottle of Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru. For some reason, this is particularly true of my taste in chocolate.