Toby Young

Should I regret writing a satirical piece for this magazine about Jason Arday? Yes, according to those who blame the ‘right-wing media’ for his death. A petition started by Jolyon Maugham this week calling for a public inquiry into the ‘press harassment’ of Arday has gained more than 100,000 signatures. A letter from Dawn Butler MP to Ipso urges the independent press regulator to use ‘every available lever’ to take ‘decisive action’ against the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator. Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, has named me as a particularly egregious offender, while the novelist Will Self has called for the journalists who exposed Arday’s wrongdoing to be prosecuted.

My father, Michael, who was a sociologist among other things, was once asked by a drug company to do some market research into a pill it was developing that could change skin colour from black to white. The company hoped it might go some way to tackling racial prejudice. After Michael interviewed some prospective customers in south London, he concluded there wouldn’t be much demand. The problem, they told him, was that it would leave their features unchanged so they’d end up looking like albinos – and there was no reason to think they’d experience any less racism. On balance, they’d prefer to remain as they were. As a bald man, I’ve always felt the same way about hair transplants.

There was something surreal about my visit to La Cité du Vin, Bordeaux’s wine museum, last Saturday. From the top floor, with its panoramic view of the city, you could see the smoke from the Gironde wildfire turning the sky yellow, yet none of the staff seemed remotely concerned. This was in spite of the fact that the conflagration had already triggered France’s largest evacuation since the second world war and was getting closer to Bordeaux every hour. OK, maybe they thought it unlikely they’d be asked to leave their homes, but weren’t they worried about the region’s vineyards? These people worked at a museum dedicated to celebrating wine, for Christ’s sake.

When Steve Reed, the now ex-communities secretary, unveiled his social cohesion ‘action plan’ earlier this year, he promised to publish an ‘evidence review’ on ‘the impacts of misinformation’. Commissioned by the government’s chief scientific adviser, it would focus on ‘how to measure the problem, assess harms and counter and mitigate these harms’. That report has now been published and the headline finding is that ‘anti-LGBTQ+ narratives’ – such as claiming that state schools and other public authorities have been captured by gender ideology, and questioning whether biological males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports – are examples of misleading and false information that cause harm, alongside climate denial and deepfake images.

Last week I watched a clip of Ian Wright explaining why it meant so much to him, as a black former player, that Jude Bellingham is uninhibited about revelling in his achievements. In the past, he said, some black players had been criticised for being too cocky, as though they’d forgotten their place. So he was pleased that it is now completely acceptable for a black player to strut around with a bit of swagger. I can see his point, but I also thought: why do you have to racialise this remarkable young player? Can’t we just celebrate him as an Englishman? England’s progress in the World Cup is one of those moments in which we’re supposed to set our differences aside and come together.

The problem with being a well-known climate sceptic is that whenever there’s a heatwave, you get buttonholed by eco-zealots who think it ‘proves’ they’re right and you’re wrong. The first person to confront me during the current sunny spell was a Guardian journalist at a right-wing conference, which the newspaper had clearly identified as a hotbed of ‘denialism’. It didn’t help that the air conditioning wasn’t working and it was approaching 40°C in the main auditorium. ‘I see you’re sweating profusely,’ he began, shoving a microphone in my face. ‘Still think climate change is a hoax?’ I had to patiently explain that few people on my side of this debate deny that climate change is real.

Just when you think this government cannot get any madder, it publishes a truly mental green paper. Called ‘Watch this Space’ and produced by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, it suggests forcing social media platforms to make content produced by public-service media providers, like the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, ‘prominent and easily discoverable’. So, if you search for an instructional video on YouTube about how to do the foxtrot, it would steer you towards an episode of Strictly Come Dancing. And the content recommended for you by a platform’s algorithm wouldn’t be based on your personal preferences, but on what DCMS – or possibly Ofcom, the details are vague – thinks you ought to be consuming.

My son Charlie sat his final A-level paper last week and the significance of this has only just sunk in. It’s not simply that he has finished his schooling; he’s the last of my children to do so. No more PTA meetings, no more parents’ evenings, no more school runs. My kids are all grown up. I’ve fulfilled my biological duty, raising four of them to adulthood, and can now disappear over the horizon into the sunset – or, rather, the Sunset Care Home. This is particularly poignant as I helped set up the school my children went to. Between 2009 and 2011, I led a small group of parents and volunteers who founded the first free school to sign a funding agreement with Michael Gove, then the education secretary.

The problem with my gambling, Caroline has always maintained, is not the fact that I nearly always lose. I only ever bet on QPR, so that’s inevitable. No, the issue is that I might pass on the habit to my children, particularly the boys. My bets rarely exceed £25, but my sons might have less self control. What if they become addicts, she wants to know? It will ruin their lives. In her eyes, gambling in front of them is like snorting heroin off the kitchen table. Well, it pains me to say it, but she was right. My youngest recently celebrated his 18th birthday and the first thing he did, at one minute after midnight, was open a bet365 account. The fact that his becoming an adult coincided with the start of the World Cup didn’t help.

Like many people, I’ve been bemoaning the woke capture of our security services for some time. In 2024, Sir Richard Moore, then the head of MI6, resigned from the Garrick Club during the row over the admission of women, and earlier this year it emerged MI5 was excluding white people from registering interest for administrative roles due to the ‘under-representation’ of black, Asian and minority ethnic people. You would hope the recruitment of spies would be based on merit, given the vital role they play in protecting the national interest, but apparently diversity targets are more important.

The big revelation in Lord Ashcroft’s forthcoming biography of Nigel Farage is that he’s been banned from Desert Island Discs. According to Ashcroft’s sources, an appearance by the Reform UK leader would make some BBC employees feel ‘unsafe’ and might lead to other high-profile figures boycotting the long-running show. ‘I have come to expect nothing less from the BBC,’ Farage told the Mail on Sunday. ‘Their blatant bias has been obvious for years.’ The BBC has categorically denied the story and, in fairness, its ‘blatant bias’ doesn’t extend to Question Time, which Farage has appeared on about 40 times in the past 26 years.

I’ve spent the last few days composing a response to the government’s consultation on whether to introduce a statutory minimum age for sites like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. The consultation, announced on 19 January, was intended to spike the guns of Lord Nash, a Conservative peer who’d proposed an amendment to the Schools Bill banning under-16s from social media. It didn’t work and his amendment was carried two days later, although he was later persuaded to withdraw it after the government tabled its own amendment pledging to impose some kind of ban regardless.