Toby Young

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 pioneering sociologist who coined the word meritocracy.

Although entitled to use the style The Hon. Toby Young, he does not.

Young was educated at Creighton School (now Fortismere School), Muswell Hill and King Edward VI Community College, Totnes.

Young later claimed that he was not popular at school, writing, "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 ), and was briefly employed under a Government Youth Training Scheme.

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 a scheme to provide university access to comprehensive pupils.

Despite thus failing to achieve that offer, he was nevertheless 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.

Toby Daniel Moorsom Young (born 17 October 1963) is a British social commentator.

He is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union, an associate editor of The Spectator, and a former associate editor at Quillette.

Young graduated in 1986 with a first in PPE, and then worked for The Times for a six-month period 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 and spent a two-year period at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he carried out research for a PhD which he left before completing.

A graduate of the University of Oxford, Young briefly worked for The Times, before co-founding the London magazine Modern Review in 1991.

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

Its motto was "Low culture for highbrows".

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

After being sacked by Vanity Fair in 1998, he stayed in New York for two more years, working as a columnist for the New York Press, before returning to the UK in 2000.

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 seasons 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.

Young has been at the centre of several controversies.

A memoir of these years, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, was published in 2001.

Following Jack Davenport, Young performed in the West End one-man stage adaptation of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People in 2004.

Theatre critic Lyn Gardner gave it a one star review commenting that "The curious thing about this is that Young's day job is as theatre critic of the Spectator. You would think he might have developed some respect for the job that actors do. Clearly not. But then, neither does he appear to have picked up any tips on acting along the way."

A review in The Stage disagreed, saying "Despite Young's previous thespic experience being the only student at Anna Scher’s drama school not to get a part in Grange Hill and having been fired after a week as an extra on the film Another Country, he gives a thoroughly convincing performance as himself…".

The Evening Standard also praised his performance.

"The whole enterprise was driven by one fairly simple idea", Young said in 2005.

"And that was that critics had a responsibility to take the best popular culture as seriously as the best high culture".

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

Burchill had tried to replace Young as editor with Raven.

"Ultimately the reason we fell out is because our relationship began as a kind of mentor-apprentice, and that was a kind of relationship which Julie was comfortable with. It was only when I succeeded in getting out from under her shadow that our relationship deteriorated", Young said in 2005.

Young moved to New York City shortly afterwards to work for Vanity Fair accepting an invitation from its editor, Graydon Carter.

In the time he wrote for the magazine he contributed 3,000 words, but was paid $85,000.

In 2005, he co-wrote (with fellow Spectator journalist Lloyd Evans) a sex farce about the David Blunkett/Kimberley Quinn intrigue and the "Sextator" affairs of Boris Johnson and Rod Liddle called Who's the Daddy? It was named as the Best New Comedy at the 2006 Theatregoers' Choice Awards.

In 2015, he 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.

Born in Buckinghamshire, Young was brought up in Highgate, North London, and in South Devon.