Toby Young

I’ve been mulling over Marco Rubio’s latest salvo in the Trump administration’s assault on the Censorship-Industrial Complex. The US Secretary of State has announced he’ll impose visa bans on foreign nationals judged to be censoring US citizens or US tech companies. And according to one news report, the ban will apply to their family members too. So who might be on this blacklist? Rubio hasn’t named names, but I can think of a few candidates. Imran Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)would be hard-pressed to deny his pro-censorship lobby group targets US citizens and US tech companies, because ‘Centre’ is spelt C-E-N-T-E-R, though the company was set up in the UK.

I’ve just returned from a walking holiday in Northumberland with Caroline and my mother-in-law. I say ‘walking’ but that makes it sound more physically demanding than it was. Billed as ‘gentle guided walking’, it was more like an ambling holiday, and the distances weren’t very great. On the second day, I was anxious to make it to the pub to watch the League One play-off final, so raced ahead and completed the walk – the entire walk – in less than an hour. It was a packaged tour organised by HF Holidays, a co-operative set up as the Holiday Fellowship in 1913 by Thomas Arthur Leonard, a non-conformist social reformer. He wanted to save factory workers from the fleshpots of Blackpool by encouraging them to take walking holidays instead.

Caroline has gone on strike. At least, as far as cooking is concerned. Her case for downing spatulas is that she’s been cooking steak, chicken and bacon for my three sons and me for the best part of 25 years and, as a vegetarian, she’s had enough. Henceforth, she’s going to prepare vegetarian meals. If we’d like to share those with her she’s happy to make enough for all, but if we want something meaty we’re on our own. Now, I wouldn’t mind the occasional nut cutlet and sweet potato – I can even stomach tofu and scrambled egg. But for Caroline, a ‘vegetarian meal’ consists of a fried egg on toast and some spinach leaves. It’s what my sons and I would call a ‘snack’ – and a pretty dreary one at that.

The weekend before last, I came home from walking the dog at about noon to find Caroline asleep in bed. This was surprising for three reasons. She’d been up and about when I left the house. She’s not one for taking naps. And her mother was coming to lunch. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked, prodding her awake. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I felt a headache coming on, took some Nurofen and suddenly started feeling incredibly dizzy. So I decided to lie down for a few minutes and then fell asleep.’ I wasn’t too worried because she does occasionally suffer from dizziness, usually accompanied by a migraine. So I made lunch while her mother went to a chemist and bought Caroline some travel sickness pills that she thought would help.

Last week Caroline sent me an Instagram reel that featured a Norwegian word and its English translation. A ‘tidsoptimist’, I discovered, is ‘someone who is overly optimistic about how much time they have, often underestimating how long tasks will take and therefore frequently running late’. That perfectly describes me. Caroline is punctual to a fault, often arriving early to appointments, and she finds my tardiness intensely irritating. Whenever I have to meet her anywhere – at a friend’s house for dinner, for instance – she will pretend I’m expected 15 minutes beforehand, so when I’m quarter of an hour late I will actually be on time.

In its manifesto, Labour pledged to recruit 6,500 new teachers and the Education Secretary reiterated this a few days after the election. ‘From day one, we are delivering the change this country demands and putting education back at the forefront of national life,’ said Bridget Phillipson. ‘We will work urgently to recruit thousands of brilliant new teachers and reset the relationship between government and the education workforce.’ If that really is her intention, she’s got a funny way of going about it. Last week, I got an email from Ian Hunter, CEO of the multi-academy trust I co-founded, alerting me to a funding shortfall in the next academic year. He’d been notified that the increase in the trust’s general annual grant for 2025-26 is 1.

Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve been campaigning for their abolition for five years and there was a breakthrough this week with the Conservatives unveiling a plan to scrap them. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is going to table an amendment to Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill that would make it illegal in almost all circumstances for the police to collect or retain personal data relating to hate incidents where no laws have been broken. For those unfamiliar with this Orwellian concept, an NCHI is a record the police make when someone accuses you of a ‘hate crime’ and they can find no evidence a crime has been committed. That sounds odd.

Within a few months, the constitution that has served this country so well for hundreds of years will yet again be vandalised by a Labour government drunk with power. Tony Blair did what damage he could, what with devolution, the Human Rights Act and the creation of the Supreme Court. But Sir Keir Starmer wants to go further. New Labour’s ‘reform’ of the House of Lords, limiting the number of voting hereditaries to just 92, wasn’t spiteful enough, apparently. A bill is being railroaded through that will reduce that rump to zero. The arguments against this wanton act of destruction should be familiar to most readers. For one thing, the hereds had a better attendance record than life peers in the last parliament – 49 per cent vs 47.

I was having a drink in the Bishops’ Bar in the House of Lords last month when I was introduced to a 92-year-old peer called Lord McColl of Dulwich. I asked him if he’d known my father, Michael, who was made a life peer in 1978. Had they overlapped? He told me he hadn’t merely known him; he’d operated on him. If I have mild indigestion I think I’ve got stomach cancer; if I get a headache I decide it’s a brain tumour I realised with a start that the man I was talking to was the famous surgeon Ian McColl, who was made a life peer in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 1989. As professor of surgery at Guy’s Hospital, he treated my father for bowel cancer in 1983, an operation so successful that Michael had gone on to live for another 19 years.

One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to cancel the release of Batgirl, a summer blockbuster the studio had spent $90 million making. According to industry insiders, Zaslav thought the politically correct reimagining of the comic book character, whose best friend in the film is played by a trans actor, would be box office poison. Better to take the tax write-off, he decided, than spend tens of millions of dollars trying to market the film to an American public that was fed up with being lectured by virtue-signalling Hollywood liberals. Incidentally, the highest-grossing film of 2022 in the US was Top Gun: Maverick.

In an otherwise excellent article for the Sunday Telegraph last week about our government’s hopeless pandemic response, Dan Hannan made one comment I’d like to take issue with. He wrote: ‘For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday Telegraph columnist, modesty forbids, etc) wanted to stand in the way of a stampede.’ In fact, he wasn’t the only one and, lacking Dan’s modesty, I’m happy to name myself as one of the first journalists to oppose the lockdown policy, along with Peter Hitchens, Allison Pearson, Ross Clark, Julia Hartley-Brewer and a handful of others. But Dan is right to emphasise how one-sided the debate was, with almost everyone falling in behind the government.

Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were warned that ‘sustained eye contact could be considered aggressive’ in some cultures. I don’t think they meant supporters of Millwall football club, but you never know.

Is the ‘Cathedral’ about to fall down? That’s the name given by the right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin to denote the 21st century’s most prestigious intellectual institutions, particularly in journalism and academia. He’s talking about the BBC, CNN, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. But we can enlarge the definition to include nearly all the West’s high-status institutions and professions. One of the mysteries of the Cathedral, he says, is that the people in these power centres seem to be members of the same cult-like religious movement – the Great Awokening, Wokus Dei – even though there’s no Holy See responsible for its official doctrine.

I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to spend her third year in a Spanish-speaking country either working or studying. Instead of opting for a university in Barcelona or Madrid, which would be the normal thing to do, she decided to get a job in Medellin. Can’t think where she gets that rebellious streak! So that’s why I’ve spent the past week in South America. Colombia is quite a long way to go for such a short trip. To get to Medellin, I flew via Madrid, which meant departing from Gatwick at 10 a.m. and arriving at about 8 p.m. local time, a 13-hour journey. If you factor in getting to and from the airport either side, as well as faffing about with security, it took the best part of 24 hours.