Toby Young

Watching a group of unruly children make mincemeat out of a well-meaning teacher has become a television staple and Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School, a factual entertainment series that debuted on BBC2 on Tuesday, is a case in point. We look on aghast as five teachers from China struggle to manage a class

A few years ago, I got a bit fed up with receiving Christmas cards from my friends designed to show off just how well they were doing. A typical card consisted of five or six blond children on ponies or quad bikes with a massive country house in the background. The caption would be something

Is the ‘Tories for Corbyn’ campaign politics at its most infantile? As one of the few conservative commentators willing to defend it in the media, I’ve been doing my best to rebut that charge. The most frequent line of attack is that there’s something dishonest about it. The Labour leadership election isn’t an open primary.

Forget about the countryside. When is the government going to do something about the vulpine creatures wreaking havoc in central London? The situation is now so out of control, it’s time the Prime Minister convened a meeting of Cobra to discuss the ginger menace. I’m talking, of course, about the horde of SNP MPs who’ve

I took my three boys for a cycle ride in Richmond Park on Sunday. Under normal circumstances, this would have been a good way to relax, but I had to be back home in Acton by 2.15 p.m. for my daughter’s 12th birthday party. Given that we didn’t leave the house until 11 a.m., and

Two months ago, I set myself the target of losing 11 pounds in time for the Spectator’s summer party on 1 July. To help achieve that, I swore off alcohol and, had I succeeded, my plan was to start drinking again at the party. I managed the weight loss, but didn’t make it to the

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/angelamerkel-sburden/media.mp3″ title=”Toby Young and Oliver Kamm debate Gove’s grammar” startat=1394] Listen [/audioplayer]Few things are more likely to provoke the disapproval of the bien-pensant left than criticising someone’s grammar. The very idea that one way of speaking is more ‘correct’ than another is anathema to them. Under the guise of being helpful, it asserts the

There’s a warning buried in the detail of the new report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on why top companies employ so few applicants from comprehensive schools: ‘Though this study provides valuable insights into barriers to the elite professions, there are nevertheless some limitations associated with the chosen research methodology. As a

Here is a preview of Toby Young’s column in this week’s Spectator, out tomorrow. Subscribe from just £1. There’s a warning buried in the detail of the new report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission on why top companies employ so few applicants from comprehensive schools: ‘Though this study provides valuable insights into

I’ve been reading Fire and Ashes, Michael Ignatieff’s account of his disastrous foray into politics, in an attempt to understand where it all went wrong for Ed Miliband. In combination with the election postmortems and interviews with the people in Miliband’s inner circle, it’s extremely illuminating. For those unfamiliar with his story, Ignatieff is a

I couldn’t believe it when Nicola Sturgeon called for the resignation of Alistair Carmichael, the former Scottish Secretary, over his role in the leaked memo affair. As readers will recall, the Daily Telegraph published a confidential document during the election campaign that purported to be an account of a conversation between Sturgeon and Sylvie Bermann,

I was disappointed to hear Andy Burnham on Marr last Sunday declare his opposition to free schools. He put plenty of distance between himself and Ed Miliband, even admitting Labour spent too much in the run-up to the recession, which is quite something given that he was the Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the

After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself.

I appeared on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago to discuss the age-old question of whether political satire is dead. I don’t think it is, but it has lost a good deal of vitality in recent years and the role of satire in the general election campaign is a case in point. There has

A couple of weeks ago I returned to my old Oxford college for a ‘gaudy’ — posh, Oxford-speak for a reunion. This one was for those of us who came up to Brasenose in 1983, 1984 and 1985. That group includes the Prime Minister but, not surprisingly, he wasn’t there. I imagine he didn’t want

Not a day passes when I don’t look on my father’s record with shock and awe. I’m not talking about his authorship of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, his invention of the word ‘meritocracy’ or his creation of the Open University. I’m talking about the fact that he fathered a child at the age of 80. How