Toby Young: love him or loathe him?

London

Everyone has at least one friend that none of their other friends can stand, someone you love but everyone else loathes. Mine is called Toby Young.

For around thirty years people have asked me: are you still friends with that awful Toby Young? And with a bit of hesitation I say, well… yes. And they shake their heads or roll their eyes in disbelief and disapproval.

They don’t like his politics — he’s a right-wing conservative and founder of the Free Speech Union, which defends victims of woke ideology. And they don’t like Toby the person because of a series of sophomoric and “sexist” tweets that came to public light in 2018. It was national news and it cost Toby his career in public life.

The alleged awfulness of Young has recently returned as a topic of conversation as he’s become a member of the House of Lords. I went there to watch Toby being sworn in as a life peer. Ceremony is something the Brits pride themselves on, but this one was rather understated. The robes the peers wore looked a bit tatty, handmade like something from a school play.

And yet as we walked through one of the grand rooms full of huge paintings of British battle scenes and great statesmen of the past, a friend said to me, “Well, it doesn’t do much for Black History Month, but it works for me!”

It was funny seeing Toby in his peerage robes, all solemn and serious. I first met him back in the early 1980s when he was this brash, liberal-bashing teenage brat whose family moved into our street in North London. He’d lean out the window and shout as I passed by, “Oy hippie! Take a bath!”

His provocations were always playful; his insults laced with irony. He’d grown up in a hothouse of progressive and liberal piety. His dad, Michael Young — also made a life peer — was one of the Great and Good, who wrote the classic book The Rise of the Meritocracy. So of course Toby was bound to rebel.

In the 1980s Toby made a name for himself in journalism and was dubbed “Toady Young” by the satirical magazine Private Eye. On the contrary — toadying to the rich and the powerful was not his style. Instead of kissing an ass, he couldn’t resist giving it a good kicking, even at a cost to his career prospects.

His put-on prankishness got him fired from the Times of London and he later became a permanent headache for Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. The legendary Sunday Times editor Harry Evans once threatened to sue him — as did Robert Maxwell and numerous other people — while Martin Amis once threatened to throttle him should their paths ever cross. He went on to write a brilliant memoir called How to Lose Friends and Alienate People which later became a movie with Simon Pegg playing Toby.

His book was a celebration of the lovable loser — the guy who loses at love and refuses to play the media game in the way you need to to get ahead. Toby has always been very funny and never took himself seriously. (He used to boast that he had “negative charisma.”) He’s not as funny as he used to be — but then, who is? We are living in serious times. The first casualty of culture war is comedy.

This might read like his obituary and in a way it is. That old Toby is dead. The pesky provocateur has become a peer of the realm, embraced by the very establishment we all loathe when young. Back in the day we called this selling out, but you can’t stay an iconoclastic brat all your life.

That said, I miss the old Toby — irreverent, incorrigible, a good-time gadfly who gave the finger to the rich and powerful, whatever their politics.

But it’s not just Toby who has changed. That kind of journalist seems to have disappeared from the scene. They’ve all become so sanctimonious and self-righteous — those of the left and the right. Both sides talk as if they have a monopoly on wisdom and virtue while their opponents are morally debased and intellectually bankrupt.

Of course, English hacks — from Orwell to Hitchens — have often been serious about politics and the need for political engagement. But their commitments were tempered by irony and self-deprecation. Left and right — people like Hitchens and Kingsley Amis — would have happily gotten pissed together in the 1970s over lunch. That would never happen today with Douglas Murray and Owen Jones.

I don’t agree with a lot of Toby’s political positions, but they don’t bother me. People who loathe Toby don’t know him as a person. They assume he must be a bad man because he supported Brexit!

What they don’t know is that yes, he’s got his flaws, but Young is on balance a good man — he is a good dad, a good husband and he’s been a good friend to me. Whenever I’ve had difficult times in my life he was the first one to offer help. And I know others who would say the same thing.

Since he became a lord more people have asked me if I’m still friends with Toby Young. I get to say, “Yes, I am — and proud of it.”

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2025 World edition.