As I exited the Today programme last week, my phone buzzed, indicating I had just received a text message. Which one of my friends was congratulating me on having just trounced another government minister? According to the LCD screen it was Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall! Hugh is an old Oxford contemporary whom I hadn’t heard from in
Horses, of course, have more sense than to bet on people. But how much do they know about what is going on? Watching the contenders parading before the Betfair-sponsored King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, the richest race in the UK calendar, you could not miss the frothy sweat already streaming down the flanks
Like most middle-class parents, I feel duty-bound to take my children to the theatre occasionally. Why is this? I tell myself it is a way of broadening their horizons, but really it is all about class. It is the same reason I encourage them to play with wooden toys and eat broccoli and say ‘please’.
‘Antichrist’ is the comic masterpiece of a con artist mocking fans of high culture Is Antichrist, the new film from Lars von Trier, a comedy? At first glance, that seems like a ludicrous suggestion. It contains some of the most disturbing images I’ve ever seen in the cinema, including a scene in which Charlotte Gainsbourg
Many worry these days about the quality of British racing. Racecards are stuffed with low-rated handicaps for poor-quality animals simply to keep the betting-office tills churning. But the quality of the men and women steering them from the saddle has never been higher. You could not expect to see a better example of riding from
My heart goes out to Hardeep Singh Kohli, the turban-wearing comed-ian and writer (and a contributing editor to this magazine). According to a BBC spokeswoman, he has been suspended from The One Show for six months following a complaint by a female colleague. ‘He was reprimanded and immediately apologised,’ she said. ‘He agreed to take
As funny as Bruno undoubtedly is, Baron-Cohen’s film is fundamentally dishonest One of the funniest scenes in Bruno is when Sacha Baron-Cohen, playing the gay Austrian television presenter, appears on a talk show in Texas called The Richard Bey Show. The African-American audience is none too impressed when he tells them he’s looking for a
Half an hour before it might have been Armageddon. The sky was black as pitch and the rain was bucketing down, not the happiest sound in a yard which two years ago was flooded out. But as an athletic bunch of horses jingled round the copper beech in Harry Dunlop’s trotting circle the atmosphere was
‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Father’s Day piece that described a typical Sunday in my life. Essentially, it involved being an indentured slave to my four young children. Several people pointed out that I was guilty of ‘helicopter
By my epic standards, this was an extremely polite best man’s speech It never ceases to amaze me that I am still asked to speak in public. If I am not the worst orator of my generation, I must be a close second. The last time I performed an after-dinner speaking gig was in Bath
Newmarket trainer William Haggas should be one of racing’s ambassadors to the world. Win or lose he communicates pleasure. Take Triple Aspect’s victory at Sandown on Saturday in the Agfa Listed sprint. ‘He’s a really scrubby little thing and he moved to post like a goat,’ declared the candid trainer. ‘But he’s really genuine and
I would like to take this opportunity to apologise unreservedly to Twitter. Like many of my colleagues, I unfairly characterised it as a vacuous expression of our narcissistic age. In fact, it turns out to be the most effective tool for advancing freedom and democracy since the invention of the internet. In Iran, the anti-government
For several weeks now I have been agonising about whether to run for Parliament as an independent at the next election. On the one hand, the current political crisis means that an independent has a higher-than-normal chance of being elected. But on the other, it is not clear what an MP who isn’t affiliated with
The poet says you are nearer God’s heart in a garden than anywhere on earth. Goodwood on a summer day with sun gleaming off chestnut flanks, Jamie Spencer and George Baker swooping sweetly and just enough breeze to ruffle the mini skirts does it even better. Admittedly, the Almighty let me down on Saturday when
I am not a particularly religious man, but occasionally something happens that convinces me there really is a God. I was in the Virgin Atlantic departure lounge in Las Vegas, resigned to spending the next nine-and-a-half hours sitting in Economy with my family, when an announcement came over the tannoy: ‘Would Toby Young please come
Las Vegas is the polar opposite of the nanny state. Which is why it’s under threat My friend Rob Long, an American television producer, once joked that he couldn’t understand the movie Leaving Las Vegas. ‘I just don’t get it,’ he said. ‘Why would anyone want to leave Las Vegas?’ After spending four weeks here,
Mother of Parliaments? More like the Ugly Sister of Parliaments these days. But without an expenses system like a roulette wheel permanently fixed to pay up, how can the rest of us find the money to have our moats cleared and our helipad hedges trimmed? As usual the Twelve to Follow relies on a scientific
I flatter myself that I’m a Vegas insider, but in fact I’m just a regular sucker I am spending the entire month of May in Las Vegas making an American television programme and I am not having a good time. Before embarking on this trip, I indulged in all sorts of fantasies about what might
‘This is a great metaphor for the death of Vegas,’ I said, indicating the room I was in. The journalist I was with had billed it as an exclusive club where illusionists tried out their latest tricks, but it was more like a support group for unemployed magicians. Most of them were standing behind trestle
There are trainers who greet winners by noisily embracing their owners, planting smackers on everything in sight from the horse to the clerk of the course and suddenly becoming voluble blood brothers with racing writers they have previously shunned like slugs in their lettuce. And then there is John Oxx, the Irish maestro from whom