Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
I’m currently in Marrakech for half-term and was planning on writing a column about how disappointed my children are by this cosmopolitan city. To them, it’s not exotic at all. On the contrary, it’s indistinguishable from large swaths of west London. My four-year-old woke up in the taxi taking us from the airport to our
At a lunch party last Sunday with a group of journalists, the conversation inevitably turned to class and how this ancient English obsession has come to dominate the political news agenda. It’s now such a hot topic that the moment a member of the government does anything that can be construed as remotely snobbish —
There was quite an important news story buried beneath all the post-match analysis from the party conferences. Apparently there really is life after death. Perhaps the reason this ‘news’ didn’t receive more coverage is because it’s not based on any startling new evidence. Rather, the claim has been made by a man called Eben Alexander
I’m writing this from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where I’ve been asking more or less everyone the same question: ‘When David Cameron gracefully exits the political stage in 2018, having won a thumping majority in 2015, who do you most want to succeed him: Boris Johnson or Michael Gove?’ The popular choice is
In my last Spectator column, I mounted a polemical defence of Michael Gove’s GCSEs reforms and, in the course of advancing my argument, I made a claim that I’ve subsequently been hounded about. Indeed, a website called fullfact.org mounted an investigation into this claim and concluded that I was guilty of ‘gross exaggeration’. Needless to
On the principle that you should know your enemy, I’ve spent the last few days trying to work out where the critics of Michael Gove’s GCSE reforms are coming from. Why does anyone object to introducing more rigour into the classroom? Just to be clear, the last government presided over a period of relentless dumbing
Bad news for those of us with only one X-chromosome: men are on their way out. That’s the view of Hanna Rosin, an enterprising young American journalist who has turned an essay she wrote for The Atlantic two years ago into the most talked-about book of the moment — The End of Men: And the
Around the middle of last year, I was approached by the writer Tim Lott to see if I’d like to be a judge in the annual literary competition he organises. On the face of it, the prospect wasn’t very appealing. It’s a romantic fiction prize and who wants to read dozens of chick lit novels,
A few weeks ago, I went to a party at Paul and Marigold Johnson’s house and fell into conversation with Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, a journalistic idol of mine. In addition to being one of Britain’s foremost conservative intellectuals, he was my first proper boss on Fleet Street. He employed me to write opinion pieces and
I’ve just returned from a middle-class camping holiday. I don’t mean one of those camping weekends that doubles as a literary festival, like Port Eliot in Cornwall. I mean I’ve just spent three nights at a campsite that is middle-class all year round. Blackberry Wood in Sussex is about ten miles from Brighton and while
Rick Muir, an associate director of the IPPR, published a paper this week called ‘Not For Profit: the role of the private sector in England’s schools’ in which he argues against allowing commercial companies to play a greater role in the delivery of taxpayer-funded education. As a contributor to a recent book published by the
About 15 years ago, I spent a ‘track day’ at Silverstone with my best friend Sean Langan. The climax was an Audi TT race, the result of which has always been a matter of dispute. I crossed the line first, but a race official told us afterwards that, technically, I should have been disqualified for
It won’t surprise many people to learn that the British Olympian selected to carry Team GB’s flag at the opening ceremony tomorrow went to a private school. Triple gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy attended George Watson’s College, a Scottish independent school established in 1741. Annual fees are a fraction under £10,000. Earlier this month, the
I always thought it was something that happened to other men as they got older, but not me. I was different. Owing to my extraordinary machismo and strength of character, I would not experience this ‘life change’ until I was at least 75 — and at that point I would just take a pill to
At the conclusion of the Wimbledon final, after Andrew Murray’s big girl’s blouse routine, I was tempted to tweet something uncharitable about men who cry in public. I don’t consider myself to be a stick-in-the-mud reactionary, but there’s something about men who turn on the waterworks that brings out my inner Sir Bufton Tufton. Whatever
Roxy Mark II is dead. I hoped I’d never have to write those words, but there’s no doubt about the matter. I don’t mean our replacement hamster has escaped like the first one (current whereabouts unknown). I mean she’s expired. She’s not resting. She’s passed on. She is no more. She has gone to meet
I appeared on Newsnight last week to discuss Michael Gove’s proposal to replace GCSEs with O-levels and CSEs and there was near-universal agreement among the ‘educationalists’ present that moving to a ‘two-tier’ system was a retrograde step. They acknowledged that some children would benefit from doing O-levels rather than GCSEs. But such gains would be
I’m writing this after one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. I’m currently staying with my friends John and Louise on their farm in East Africa and on Monday John arranged for the two of us to go out on a ‘rough shoot’ in the bush. There are plenty of good game birds
As you read this, I’ll be preparing to give an after-dinner speech at one of the oldest prep schools in Kenya. The school motto is Fortuna Favet Fortibus, so my theme is going to be the importance of character. I’m going to ask whether there’s any point in spending upwards of £30,000 a year to
It’s not every day the Queen invites you to tea. Admittedly, I’m not alone in being granted that honour. At the Royal Garden Party I went to last week, I was among several thousand dignitaries craning their necks to get a glimpse of Her Majesty. But it was still a lovely day out — more