Toby Daniel Moorsom Young, Baron Young of Acton (born 17 October 1963), is a British social commentator and Conservative life peer. He 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. A graduate of the University of Oxford, Young briefly worked for The Times, before co-founding the London magazine Modern Review in 1991. He edited it until financial difficulties led to its demise in 1995. His 2001 memoir, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, details his subsequent employment at Vanity Fair. He then went on to write for The Sun on Sunday, the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator. He also served as a judge in series five and six of the television show Top Chef. A proponent of free schools, Young co-founded the West London Free School and served as director of the New Schools Network. In 2015 Young wrote an article in advocacy of genetically engineered intelligence, which he described as "progressive eugenics". In early January 2018, he was briefly a non-executive director on the board of the Office for Students, an appointment from which he resigned within a few days after Twitter posts described as "misogynistic and homophobic" were uncovered. In 2020, press regulator Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) found Young to have promoted misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic in a Daily Telegraph column.
Early life Born in Buckinghamshire, Young was brought up in Highgate, North London, and in South Devon. His mother Sasha (1931–1993), 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 (later Lord Young of Dartington), a Labour life peer and sociologist who popularized the word meritocracy. Although entitled to use the style The Hon. Toby Young, he did not. Young attended Creighton School (now Fortismere School), Muswell Hill and King Edward VI Community College, Totnes. Young later wrote that he was not popular at school: "My only friend was a black boy called Remi, who explained that the reason he'd taken a shine to me was because he knew what it was like to be a 'nigger'." He left school at 16, having failed all but one of his O Levels (the pass was a C in English Literature). He 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. Having applied to study philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Oxford University, he had been given a conditional offer of three Bs plus an O Level pass in a foreign language from Brasenose College, under an Inner London Education Authority scheme to provide university access to comprehensive pupils. Despite failing to meet that offer, he was awarded a place to study at the college. Young said he was sent an acceptance letter by mistake, as well as a letter of rejection from the admissions tutor Harry Judge. In an article he wrote for The Spectator, he said that his father phoned Judge to clarify the situation – Judge was in a meeting with the PPE tutors at the time, and after some discussion, they decided to offer Young a place owing to a moral obligation the mistaken acceptance created. 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 (according to Young himself) hacking the computer system, impersonating the editor Charles Wilson and circulating information about senior executives' salaries to others around the building. He 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.
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