Announcing a change to Toby Young’s Spectator column

A few years ago, we had a bit of a problem with Toby Young’s column – one that never quite went away. He started writing for us regularly shortly after he’d written a book called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about his complete failure to make it big in New York. His column was called Status Anxiety and the idea was to showcase his self-deprecating humour, while exposing the pieties of those who take themselves and high society too seriously. From the offset, readers loved it.

But in the last few years, Toby’s life has taken a different turn. He dedicated himself to setting up new schools for disadvantaged children, schools that he’d be happy sending his own kids to. He set up the West London Free School and co-founded three others, schools big enough to help 2,000 pupils. And this was no bourgeois bubble: a fifth of the pupils would qualify for free school meals.