53 Facts About Toby Young

Toby Young is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union, an associate editor of The Spectator, creator of The Daily Sceptic blog and a former associate editor at Quillette.

Toby Young edited it until financial difficulties led to its demise in 1995.

Toby Young then went on to write for The Sun on Sunday, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator.

Toby Young served as a judge in seasons five and six of the television show Top Chef.

In 2015 Toby Young wrote an article in advocacy of genetically engineered intelligence, which he described as "progressive eugenics".

In 2020, press regulator Independent Press Standards Organisation found Toby Young to have promoted misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic in a Daily Telegraph column.

Toby Young's mother Sasha, daughter of Raisley Stewart Moorsom, a descendant of Admiral Sir Robert Moorsom, who fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, was a BBC Radio producer, artist and writer, and his father was Michael Young, a Labour life peer and sociologist who popularized the word meritocracy.

Toby Young attended Creighton School, Muswell Hill and King Edward VI Community College, Totnes.

Toby Young then retook his O Levels and went to the Sixth Form of William Ellis School, Highgate, leaving with two Bs and a C at A Level.

Toby Young said he was sent an acceptance letter by mistake, as well as a letter of rejection from the admissions tutor Harry Judge.

Toby Young graduated in 1986 with a first in PPE, and then worked for The Times for six months as a news trainee until he was fired for hacking the computer system, impersonating the editor Charles Wilson and circulating information about senior executives' salaries to others around the building.

Toby Young was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at Harvard then spent two years at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he carried out research for a PhD which he left without completing.

In 1991, Toby Young co-founded and co-edited the Modern Review with Julie Burchill and her then husband Cosmo Landesman.

Four years later the magazine was close to financial collapse and Toby Young closed it down, angering his principal financial backer Peter York, as well as Burchill and staff writer Charlotte Raven.

Toby Young moved to New York City shortly afterwards to work for Vanity Fair.

Toby Young said of the play "It was an unqualified disaster".

From 2002 to 2007, Toby Young wrote a restaurant column for the Evening Standard and claimed in a PM club membership discussion with Evan Davis that he was previously blackballed from joining the Garrick Club, a decade earlier, for criticising their catering in his column, while working for the Evening Standard.

Toby Young later authored a restaurant column for The Independent on Sunday.

Toby Young is an associate editor of The Spectator, where he writes a weekly column, the editor of Spectator Life and a regular contributor to the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph.

Toby Young was a political columnist for The Sun on Sunday for its first 11 months.

In 2019, Toby Young supported Boris Johnson for leader of the Conservative Party.

Toby Young was a proposer and co-founder of the West London Free School, the first free school to sign a funding agreement with the Education Secretary, and is a trustee of The West London Free School Academy Trust, the charitable trust that manages the school.

Toby Young stood down as CEO of the school in May 2016 after admitting that he did not realise how difficult it was going to be to run.

Toby Young denied that he was attacking the provision of equal access to mainstream schools for people with disabilities, saying he was only referring to the alleged "dumbing down" of the curriculum.

Toby Young seems to think he is held in high regard by free school advocates.

On 29 October 2016, Toby Young was appointed Director of the New Schools Network, a charity founded in 2009 to support groups setting up free schools.

In 2015, Toby Young wrote an article for the Australian magazine Quadrant entitled "The fall of meritocracy".

Toby Young attended the London Conference on Intelligence at University College London in 2017, which was described by the media and a number of politicians as a "secret eugenics conference".

Toby Young said that he attended the conference as a journalist to report about it, in preparation for the "super-respectable" International Society for Intelligence Research conference in Montreal in July 2017 at which he gave a speech, which was later published.

In January 2018 Toby Young was announced as one of the non-executive members of the board for the new Office for Students, a body intended to ensure institutions in higher education are accountable.

The Guardian later revealed that claims by the Department for Education about Toby Young's teaching posts at the University of Cambridge and Harvard were misleading as although Toby Young had taught at the universities, he had not been appointed to an academic post.

Toby Young resigned a week later, stating that his appointment had "become a distraction" counteracting the "vital work" of the OfS.

Riddell said the OfS panel report to ministers about Toby Young "made no mention of Mr Toby Young's history of controversial comments and use of social media".

In March 2020, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, Toby Young wrote in The Critic that he "suspect[ed] the Government has overreacted to the coronavirus crisis", expressing worry about the "economic cost".

Toby Young, who initiated the Lockdown Sceptics newsletter, called for stopping the lockdown before 14 April 2020.

Toby Young argued his own death would be "acceptable collateral damage".

Toby Young's view contrasted with the scientific recommendations for lockdown policy in the UK.

On 14 January 2021, the British press regulator IPSO ruled that an article Toby Young had written for The Daily Telegraph in July 2020 was "significantly misleading" and that the newspaper had failed to take care not to publish inaccurate information.

The Telegraph removed the article from its website and Toby Young deleted many of his tweets about the pandemic.

In late 2024, Toby Young was nominated for a life peerage by Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party.

Toby Young was created Baron Young of Acton, of Acton in the London Borough of Ealing, on 21 January 2025, and was introduced to the House of Lords on 28 January.

Toby Young, who co-produced the film, was played by Simon Pegg.

Toby Young has since complained about the difficulty of finding reliable domestic staff.

In 1997, Toby Young met Caroline Bondy while living in New York.

Toby Young began drinking alcohol again two years later, on their wedding day in July 2001.

Toby Young has admitted using cocaine at the Groucho Club in central London, and supplying drugs to others.

Toby Young was expelled from membership of the club in late 2001 for writing about the cocaine use of friends he had supplied with the drug during a 1997 photo shoot for Vanity Fair.

Toby Young has come under criticism for comments he made on Twitter, most of which were deleted upon his appointment to the Board of the Office for Students.

Toby Young said that he posted more than 56,000 tweets, of which 8,439 remained as at January 2018.

Toby Young referred on Twitter to the cleavage of unnamed female MPs sitting behind Ed Miliband in the Commons in 2011 and 2012.

One tweet by Toby Young was in response to a BBC Comic Relief appeal in 2009 for starving Kenyan children.

Toby Young has expressed regret for his "politically incorrect" tweets.

Toby Young is reported to have edited his own Wikipedia page 282 times over the course of six years.