Toby Young

They say never meet your heroes, but Bernard Cornwell didn’t disappoint. Knowing I’m a superfan, the events team at The Spectator asked me to interview him on stage on Monday and he was everything you could hope for: funny, candid, clever. The default register of very successful people in my experience is insincere modesty, but

The congratulatory messages started pouring in shortly after 5.30 p.m. on Monday. The Metropolitan Police had just issued a press release saying that the force would no longer investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and people were chalking this up as a victory for the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run. That may seem a

An email popped into my House of Lords inbox last week from Lt Gen. Richard Nugee with the subject line ‘National Emergency Briefing’. Ooh, I thought. That sounds interesting. Will it be about the pitiful state of our armed forces? The threat of war with Russia? The penetration of Britain’s deep state by the Chinese

I was amused to read about the spat that broke out on Greta Thunberg’s flotilla between conservative Muslims and members of the LGBTQ+ community. According to newspaper reports, the convoy stopped in Tunisia on its way to Gaza and picked up a self-described ‘communist queer militant’, along with other gay activists. This led to the

I was in Australia last week, having been invited to give the annual oration by the Robert Menzies Institute, and stopped off in Singapore on the way home. I’ve always been curious about this Southeast Asian city state, having read so much about Lee Kuan Yew, its Cambridge–educated founding father, who holds the record of

You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at all the Hollywood celebrities rending their garments about Donald Trump’s attacks on free speech. In an ‘open letter’, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, among others, took the administration to task for browbeating ABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s talk show from

When Theresa May appointed me as a non-executive director of the Office for Students, the Downing Street press office decided to embargo the news until midnight on New Year’s Day 2018. It may be that it hoped to slip it out under the radar, calculating that most journalists would be too drunk to notice. If

I’m feeling quite smug at the moment. Every year I vow to get in shape in the summer, which means losing weight, drinking less and going to the gym. The summer bit is because there’s a risk I’ll be seen in a swimming costume – I want a ‘beach-ready body’ – and there’s also the

Charlie, my 17-year-old son, was hopeful about QPR’s chances this season. True, we managed to avoid relegation only by the skin of our teeth in 2024-25, but we’ve just appointed a new manager: a Frenchman called Julien Stéphan, who won the Coupe de France in 2019 with Rennes, beating Paris Saint-Germain in the final, and

On the face of it, Wormwood Scrubs is not particularly appealing. I don’t mean the prison, but the common in the north-eastern corner of Hammersmith and Fulham. It is 170 acres of unsupervised scrubland with enough wooded areas to attract a smattering of predatory homosexuals – a poor man’s Hampstead Heath. Often, as I walk

I’m just back from Vancouver, where I was speaking at a fundraiser for the Free Speech Union of Canada. At the dinner afterwards I sat next to an Alberta separatist, a movement I was unaware of until now. Dating to the 19th century, it advocates for the secession of the province of Alberta and has

When I was a young man, the claim that Britain was in danger of becoming the 51st state was a political slur mainly thrown about by the left, particularly those who objected to the presence of US military bases. But there was some anti-American sentiment on the right, too – Enoch Powell, for instance, had

I was surprised to read a report by Sunder Katwala’s thinktank British Future saying the UK is a ‘powder keg’ of community tensions and warning of further unrest this summer. In a foreword by Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas, who are co-chairing a commission looking into last year’s riots, Britain is described as ‘fragmented’ and

About 15 years ago, I tried to interest my literary agent in a state-of-the-nation novel set in 21st-century London. My model was Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s masterpiece about New York in the 1980s. I’d read Wolfe’s essay in Harper’s magazine called ‘Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast’ in which he urges ambitious young authors to