Toby Young

I got a letter this week informing me how much it would cost to renew my car insurance: £2,671.47, up from £1,587.86. It could be worse, I suppose. Owners of Range Rovers tell me that the cost of insuring one in London for a year is about the same as the replacement value of the car. But even so. This is a seven-year-old VW Touran we’re talking about. Not the first choice of London’s crack regiment of car thieves. I will not capitulate to the soft totalitarianism of the professional-managerial class  The really depressing thing is this quote came before I’d notified the insurer of the three points Caroline has been given for going 26mph on the Finchley Road, which is now a 20mph zone.

Michael Gove is back in the news, having come up with a new definition of extremism that he wants to roll out across Whitehall and beyond. Those captured by this definition, whether persons or groups, won’t be able to take up official roles or receive taxpayers’ money, with the primary purpose being to stop Islamic radicals embedding themselves in organs of the state. But in order to pass muster, both legally and politically, the definition cannot just catch immoderate Muslims in its net, so he’s had to come up with something universal – and therein lies the difficulty.

For the past ten or so years, Caroline has taken herself off to Barbados for two weeks every winter, leaving her long-suffering husband to hold the fort. To be fair, it’s a freebie, so she can hardly be blamed. Her best friend, Bridie, is a tennis instructor and in return for giving lessons to the guests at a five-star hotel for a couple of weeks, not only does Bridie get free room and board but she gets to bring a plus one. All Caroline has to do is make up the numbers in the occasional game of mixed doubles. That I haven’t collapsed under the strain and hired a cook or a housekeeper has impressed my mother-in-law This year, though, is different. Caroline now has a part-time job in travel PR and her company has just picked up a new client with several hotels in Barbados.

I was shocked to read about the behaviour of Joe Biden’s dog, Commander. According to a CNN report based on freedom of information requests, he bit US Secret Service agents on 24 separate occasions between October 2022 and July 2023. There were also numerous other incidents involving the White House staff. These were not playful nips, either. The agents reported being bitten on the wrist, forearm, elbow, waist, chest, thigh and shoulder, with at least two bites requiring stitches. On one occasion, an agent was bitten so badly that tours of the White House had to be suspended for 20 minutes while a janitor mopped up the blood.

My oldest friend, Sean Langan, was back in the news this week. He’s carved out a niche for himself as a maker of low-budget documentaries in conflict zones and his most recent film was shown on ITV on Monday night. He keeps costs down by shooting them himself on a hand-held camera, which isn’t easy given that he also stars in them. This involves holding a camcorder at arm’s length and pointing it at himself as he wanders through some of the world’s most dangerous hot spots, often in the midst of explosions and gunfire. He’s paid a heavy price for being a war correspondent with his finances suffering and even losing several teeth The fact that he’s a one-man band means he’s able to make films in places few other documentary--makers can reach.

In 2017, David Lloyd Clubs took out a long lease on the privately owned sports facility at the end of my road. It used to be called the Park Club, but the new leaseholders, having spent £9 million tarting it up, proposed to call it ‘David Lloyd Chiswick Park’. As a proud resident of Acton, I was outraged and wrote to the CEO, pointing out that the new name would antagonise the locals by implying there was something shameful about their area. ‘The club is on a street called East Acton Lane, it’s about 250 yards from a railway station called Acton Central and 500 yards from a sign saying “Welcome to Acton”,’ I wrote. ‘If you pretend the club is located in Chiswick you will be ridiculed.

I don’t know what I’d do if QPR banned me from Loftus Road for the next two-and-a-half years. It was bad enough not being able to go to games during lockdown, but the thought of all my mates attending while I was stuck at home would be devastating. When the Rs are playing at home I look forward to the match all week – it’s become my only social activity that isn’t related to work, a vital safety valve. It would be devastating to my mental wellbeing. Yet that’s exactly what’s happened to Linzi Smith, a 34-year-old Newcastle fan. On 31 October last year she was banned from St James’ Park for the remainder of this season and the next two. Why? Not for getting into a fight in the stadium or abusing a steward.

By the time you read this, my son Ludo will be in South America, where he’s gone for what remains of his gap year. He deferred his university place and has been working in a pub since he left school, trying to earn enough money to go travelling. I made the mistake of telling him I’d match whatever he managed to save, imagining he’d struggle to put aside more than £500. Turns out, the little bugger saved more than £5,000! Still, he’s going to need £10,000 to pay his expenses. He’s spending the first four months in Brazil and doesn’t speak a word of Portuguese, so will struggle to get a part-time job, even in a bar. His girlfriend is joining him in four months and they’re planning to embark on a South American tour, beginning with Peru.

The UK Health Security Agency is sufficiently concerned about the growing number of measles cases in the West Midlands that it declared a ‘national incident’ last week. According to official figures, there have been 216 confirmed and 103 probable measles cases in the region since last October. The cause? The uptake of the MMR vaccine is at its lowest level in more than a decade, according to Dame Jenny Harries, CEO of the UKHSA. For some, this is proof of the ‘harm’ that anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists can do if greater efforts aren’t made to silence them. A leading article in the Times blamed the outbreak on ‘disease disinformation’, accusing activists of waging ‘irresponsible and immoral campaigns’.

My column from a fortnight ago seeking advice about how to limit my alcohol intake has produced a huge response – and not just from readers. At a dinner last week to commemorate Paul Johnson, a famous historian told me how he manages to be so prolific while still enjoying several glasses every night. He rises each day at 4.30 a.m., spends six hours at his desk doing serious work, then does an hour of admin, has a nice lunch, followed by an afternoon nap, another couple of hours’ work and finally a good dinner. ‘The key is the afternoon nap,’ he said. ‘It’s a way of turning one day into two.’ Unfortunately for me, this requires a superhuman effort of will, but then so did many of the other suggestions.

The death of Derek Draper, the former Labour party apparatchik, got acres of press coverage, with tributes pouring in from the great and the good, including Tony Blair. But reading the obituaries, I couldn’t help feel that they didn’t do justice to the man I first met in the early 1990s, and for a time counted among my closest friends. They neither captured the full extent of his skulduggery nor how entertaining he could be when relating the latest gossip from Blair’s inner circle. His friend Decca Aitkenhead’s piece in the Sunday Times came closest, but she left out one of my favourite anecdotes, perhaps because it involves her. As I recall, Derek’s wife, the TV presenter Kate Garraway, had sold a package to OK!

My New Year’s resolution is to cut down on my drinking. I’m not talking about bringing it within the NHS’s recommended limit, obviously. I’ve never met anyone who confines their alcohol intake to 14 units a week, which amounts to a bottle and a half of wine, ideally spread over many days. I’m thinking of something more in the region of two bottles a week. Why not simply stop altogether? Partly because I’ve tried that before and don’t have the willpower. The longest stretch I’ve gone without a drink was in the two years leading up to my marriage in 2001, because I didn’t think Caroline would go through with it if I didn’t take the pledge.

One of the things I look forward to most about Christmas is the football, something that’s particularly true if you’re a fan of a team in one of the lower tiers. Premier League clubs play 38 games per season, not counting the FA Cup, the Carabao Cup and any European competitions they happen to be in. Championship clubs, by contrast, play 46 league games every season and try to cram in as many as they can over the holidays. But even allowing for that, QPR has an unusually crowded fixture list this year – no fewer than eight matches between 1 December and 1 January. The last time I went to see Millwall, with all four kids in tow, we were locked in a metal cage at the exit. This was for our own safety, the stewards explained This would normally have me purring with pleasure.

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Garrick. Named after an 18th-century theatrical impresario, it was established in 1831 as a club where ‘actors and men of refinement and education might meet on equal terms’, and in the intervening years it has admitted members of other equally disreputable professions – lawyers, writers, surgeons, journalists. I was put up myself about 15 years ago, but blackballed by the chair of the catering committee who took exception to a throwaway remark I’d made about the food. I intend to reapply, but will probably be blackballed again on account of the argument I’m about to make in defence of the club’s ‘men only’ membership policy. Why am I against admitting women?

According to a friend who sold a successful consulting business a few years ago, the problem with employing middle-class Britons, unlike Americans, is that there’s a summit to their ambitions. Once they’ve earned enough money to trade in their BMW for a Porsche, install a new kitchen and create an attic room with a dormer window, they start taking it easy. ‘Those are the only three things they really want,’ he says. As a freelance journalist, I’ve abandoned all hope of owning a Porsche or getting the attic done. But after living in the same house in Acton for 15 years, I’m finally remodelling the kitchen. Or rather Caroline is.

Many of my conservative friends are beginning to catastrophise about the future of Britain in light of the pro-Palestinian protests that have erupted in our major cities over the past month. ‘I think you’re screwed,’ an American philosopher told me on Monday. ‘You should have raised the alarm about immigration from Muslim countries 25 years ago and now it’s too late. The fox is in the hen house.’ Such pessimism is coming to a head this weekend, with tens of thousands of protestors threatening to disrupt the Remembrance ceremonies which are taking place over two days owing to 11 November falling on a Saturday.