Toby Young

The think tank Policy Exchange has just published an excellent report on Britain’s urban green spaces called ‘Park Land’. The report’s author, Katherine Drayson, argues that we need to take better care of our parks and public gardens, particularly in the north-east, where local authority expenditure on open spaces has been cut by more than

I love The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. On the face of it, they’re a great advertisement for just how broadminded and sophisticated the editors of this magazine are. We’re able to rise above the political fray and generously acknowledge MPs on both sides of the House, regardless of which party they belong to.

Why is local politics so much dirtier than national politics? Is it because the players are fighting over relatively trivial matters, like Oxbridge dons competing for college posts? As Henry Kissinger said, ‘University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.’ Or is it because local politicians are less likely to be exposed

Five years ago I joined forces with some local worthies to object to the opening of a strip joint on Acton High Street. We weren’t successful, but the owner of the club decided to invite us all to the opening night. He claimed we’d got the wrong end of the stick. It wasn’t a sleazy

The first sign that something was wrong with Ludo was when he complained of a tummy ache. This was after school and hardly a rare occurrence so I didn’t think anything of it. The following morning, he still had a tummy ache. Not a good enough reason to miss school in my opinion, but Caroline

By the time you read this I’ll be 50. A couple of years ago, when President Obama passed this milestone, I wrote a piece for the Telegraph about how much I was dreading it. But now it’s finally happening, I can’t think what all the fuss was about. Turns out it’s a bit like being

I’m still weighing up whether to run for Parliament, but after this week’s reshuffle I’ve concluded I’m in the wrong party. If you’re a middle-aged white male, particularly one who’s been to Oxford, your chances of becoming a Conservative minister are negligible. Unless you’re a pal of George Osborne’s, obviously, in which case it doesn’t

I’m writing this from the Conservative party conference in Manchester, but it’s Ed Miliband I want to discuss. In particular, his objection to Saturday’s article in the Daily Mail about his father Ralph. I felt a smidgen of sympathy for Ed when I saw the headline (‘The Man Who Hated Britain’) because a similar piece

I should never have agreed to buy Sasha fish for her tenth birthday. But it seemed like such a modest request. It’s not like you’re going to come home one day to find they’ve escaped or starved to death — like certain rodents I can think of. I was also lulled into a false sense

For most people, the question of whether to ban the burka is a purely theoretical one. Not for me. As the chairman of a charitable trust that sits above two schools, it’s something I’m obliged to consider. Usually, the heads of the schools fight tooth and nail to preserve their autonomy, claiming that such and

I was at a surprise birthday party for a member of the cabinet last week when a Conservative minister spotted me walking past and grabbed my arm. ‘You must do it,’ he said. ‘Do what?’ ‘Become the Conservative candidate in Hammersmith. If all you manage to do is defeat Andy Slaughter and then spend the

The Hammersmith Conservative Association will shortly be looking for a candidate to run against the sitting Labour MP in 2015 and I’m thinking of applying. But by God, it’s a tough decision. On the face of it, the case against is pretty overwhelming. The local MP, Andy Slaughter, has a majority of 3,549 and on

An acquaintance of mine called Daisy Christodoulou has just published a book called Seven Myths about Education. It’s a merciless demolition of the received wisdom of the educational establishment, such as the view that there’s no point in asking children to memorise anything, because they can look it up on Google. I’m a huge fan,

Character is destiny, according to Heraclitus, and that becomes increasingly clear as you get older and chart the ups and downs of your friends. Take the fate of one of my oldest acquaintances, who I’ll call ‘Philip’. Up until his mid-forties, Philip had a pretty spectacular career as a journalist and broadcaster. He won awards,

I’m currently in Cornwall with my family and whenever I spend a lot of time with my children I’m constantly reminded of the opening lines of ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they

One of the great things about spending the summer holidays in England is that it gives you an opportunity to experience life in the country. All year, Caroline and I dream about moving out of London and spend hours scouring property websites to see what we could buy if we sold our house in Acton.

Scarcely a day passes, it seems, without another book landing with a thud on my desk that bemoans the rise of inequality. On this side of the Atlantic we have The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and Injustice by Daniel Dorling, while in America we have Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Joseph