Toby Young

Hope Not Hate is up to its usual tricks in the Denton and Gorton by-election, keeping Britain safe from fascists. In this case, the local Brownshirt is not the Green candidate, Hannah Spencer, who implicitly compared Israel to Nazi Germany in a social media post on Holocaust Memorial Day last year. No, it’s the Reform UK candidate, Matt Goodwin. According to this ‘non-partisan’ thinktank– that’s how it describes itself – Goodwin is a ‘far-right provocateur’ who, if elected ‘will become one of the most extreme MPs in the House of Commons, perhaps second only to Rupert Lowe’. Hope Not Hate has form in this regard.

One of the drawbacks of being on the jabs is that you can lose muscle mass as well as body fat. I’ve been taking Mounjaro for about six months and, apart from the expense, I have few complaints. I’ve lost about 20lb and generally feel healthier. But Caroline insists I combine the weight loss with lifting weights, so I’ve been making regular visits to a gym in White City. I hear horror stories from gym users about people treating the space as if it’s their personal film set I used to be a bit of a gym rat in my twenties and thirties, but marriage and children, not to mention a full workload, put paid to that. Not much has changed in the last quarter century, save for one glaring difference: everyone is constantly on their phones.

I was planning to begin this column by saying how relieved I was to be mentioned in the latest Epstein files. Finally! After all, Jeffrey Epstein’s list of acquaintances reads like a Who’s Who of the global power elite. How embarrassing would it be to have lived in the same city as him from 1995 to 2000, as I did, and not even receive a glancing reference? But I realise this is a subject that shouldn’t be made light of. The revelations about Lord Mandelson are genuinely shocking, even to someone as jaded as me, and raise important questions about what Sir Keir Starmer knew and when.

In the House of Lords on Monday there was a short discussion, prompted by a question from an ex-Labour minister, about whether the government is doing enough to ‘regulate the development of superintelligent AI’. This is an example of what I call ‘Caligula syndrome’, a common affliction in the Upper House. You will recall that the lunatic Roman emperor declared war on Neptune, ordering his legions to line up on the coast of Gaul and collect seashells as ‘spoils of war’. What can the British government – or indeed any government – do to halt the advance of AI? Hubris doesn’t quite cover it. It’s in the same category as believing parliament can reverse climate change.

At the end of last year, the government announced a programme designed to tackle the radicalisation of young men in schools. Teachers will be trained in how to spot misogyny in the classroom and children deemed to be at fault sent on ‘toxic masculinity’ courses – an attempt to ‘re-educate’ white working-class boys that’s guaranteed to spawn 1,000 memes. It was billed as a key component of the government’s strategy to halve violence against women and girls by 2035. Don’t worry about the grooming gangs – the real predators are the knuckle-dragging teenagers, as per Adolescence, which was festooned with Golden Globes by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association last week.

Liz Kendall, the Technology Secretary, stood up in the Commons on Monday and thundered against Elon Musk, saying the government would take urgent measures to hold him to account. The reason for her broadside is that Grok, the AI chatbot owned by Musk and now integrated into X, has been misbehaving. In the past few weeks, it has granted users’ requests to create sexualised images of women and children, causing something close to meltdown among the Musk-hating chattering classes. In the Lords, scarcely a day passes without Labour’s favourite bogeyman being wheeled out to be pelted with verbal brickbats. But how exactly does Kendall propose to rein Musk in?

On 1 January, the NHS announced it would be including a chickenpox vaccine in the bundle of inoculations given to one-year-olds, henceforth known as the MMRV, where V stands for varicella. Most people in my circle reacted badly to this news, having become vaccine sceptics after the overselling of the Covid jabs, but not me. Twenty years ago I lobbied the government to do just this. I don’t think people realise how dangerous chicken-pox can be – and not just for adults. Two days after my son Ludo was born, Caroline discovered a spot on her chest that her mum quickly diagnosed as chickenpox.

Going to see QPR on Boxing Day has become a tradition in the Young household – and not because we hold out much hope of winning. The Hoops have only won 19 of the 71 Boxing Day fixtures we’ve played since 1882, when the club was founded. The last time was in 2018, when we beat Ipswich 3-0 at home, and we haven’t won away since 1967. But going to watch our team, however poorly we play, beats festering at home in that fallow period between Christmas Day and 1 January, so my three sons and I piled into the car for the 150-mile round-trip to Fratton Road in Portsmouth. We had an additional reason for making the journey, which was a special Christmas offer from Toby Carvery whereby anyone called Toby could eat for free.

The first time I got drunk was at a wedding. I was 12 or thereabouts and sick in the taxi on the way home. I’d like to say that set the pattern for my behaviour at weddings thereafter, but it goes way beyond that. (My Uber rating is not good.) I acquired a taste for alcohol that’s stayed with me ever since. Other intoxicants have come and gone, but I’ve always returned to my first love. Which, to be clear, is wine. That first illicit tipple was Babycham – which is basically wine, right? – so perhaps my lifelong passion has been an attempt to recreate that childhood pleasure. As madeleines were to Proust, Babycham is to me. Not that I drink the revolting muck now. These days my taste runs to the pricier stuff.

On my way to the QPR game against Hull last Saturday, I was astonished to discover that Ladbrokes had made QPR the favourites. Eh? Going into this game, the Rs were 18th in the table, whereas Hull were sixth. They’d won four of their last six, whereas we were winless in five. ‘It’s almost worth putting a bet on Hull,’ I joked to Charlie, my 17-year-old son. Then I thought: ‘Why not? At least that way, if QPR lose I’ll make some money.’ But if I was going to do it, I might as well get the most favourable odds, so I did a quick trawl of the online betting apps, all of which I’ve signed up to, and discovered that bet365 was offering 3/1 – by far the best. I transferred some money from my bank account and stuck £25 on the Tigers to win.

In my brief career as a parliamentarian I have developed a rule of thumb when it comes to evaluating legislation: if a bill has been brought forward in response to a national outcry about a terrible tragedy, whether the death of a child or dozens of adults, it will almost always be rotten. In particular, it will go far beyond what is required to prevent similar tragedies in future and create a swath of new laws that the already overburdened police will be expected to enforce. That I’m afraid is the default response of parliament when it’s trying to respond to an eruption of public anger: to stick more criminal offences on the statute books. A case in point is the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, known colloquially as the Hillsborough Law.

Have a thought for Darren Grimes, the 32-year-old Reform councillor. Since becoming deputy leader of Durham County Council in May, he has been investigated more than two dozen times by his officials following complaints. Among other things, he has been accused of bringing the council into disrepute, failing to treat people with respect and not representing people with different views. Of those complaints, the vast majority have been dismissed, but a handful are still under investigation. Darren has condemned this ‘persecution’ and he’s amended the council’s code of conduct to include clauses protecting free speech.

I’m writing this from Washington, D.C., where I’ve spent the best part of a week talking to politicos and thinktankers about the state of free speech in the mother country. Don’t believe our Prime Minister when he says it’s in rude health, I’ve been telling them. It’s on life support and any pressure that can be brought to bear on His Majesty’s Government to protect it would be hugely appreciated. Once again, it’s time for the new world to come to the rescue of the old. Not that they need much convincing. The view of Britain among Washington’s political class isn’t informed by diplomatic cables or articles in the Economist, but by viral videos on X.

They say never meet your heroes, but Bernard Cornwell didn’t disappoint. Knowing I’m a superfan, the events team at The Spectator asked me to interview him on stage on Monday and he was everything you could hope for: funny, candid, clever. The default register of very successful people in my experience is insincere modesty, but Cornwell was something different – falsely immodest. That is to say, there were moments when he blew his own trumpet, but in a way clearly intended to be ironic. The lasting impression was of someone completely at ease with his achievements – not puffed up, but justifiably proud. Few authors can match Cornwell’s accomplishments.

The congratulatory messages started pouring in shortly after 5.30 p.m. on Monday. The Metropolitan Police had just issued a press release saying that the force would no longer investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and people were chalking this up as a victory for the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run. That may seem a bit of a stretch, but the Met linked the decision to its failed pursuit of Graham Linehan, the comedy writer it arrested at Heathrow airport in September over three tweets taking the piss out of trans-rights activists. It was thanks in part to the FSU, which pulled together Graham’s legal team, that the Met decided to abandon the case. In fact though, the person who deserves most of the credit is Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner.