The Joke: Final Part

The show trial and public execution of journalist Toby Young

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In the months following Young’s defenestration there were signs, if not of actual recovery, then of a kind of survival. His Spectator column continued to appear and had a macabre fascination, like an interview with Simon Weston immediately after the bombing of Sir Galahad. Whether ghoulishly or not, most of us would wish to ask the same question: what was it like to have your life so comprehensively destroyed yet go on living?

In an article in Quillette, “The Public Humiliation Diet” (23 July 2018), Young told us. He spoke of “depressive episodes”, of his public shaming as a “brutal, shocking experience that strips you of your dignity”, and said he would always look back on it as “one of the low points” of his life. He wrote of “the fear that people you know and care about are going to believe some of the terrible things people are saying about you and the feeling that there’s nothing you can do about it.” The sense of shame, he said, was “burning, all-consuming… Thank God my father’s not still alive.”

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What had saved him, he said, was exercise. Having lost half a stone during the 10 days or so of attacks from the press, he’d decided to take up running to lose even more, reasoning that though his enemies had succeeded in wrecking his career and reputation, “at least I can control my own body weight!... The part of me that blames myself for what’s happened, and thinks I deserved everything I got, gets a lot of satisfaction from punishing the miscreant responsible.”

At the end of the year, in a Spectator column, Young detailed other unexpected forms of grace that came along with his public shaming and loss of position. It had given him more time to spend with his family, more opportunities for reading, and even stimulated his enjoyment of classical music. “As I’m jogging round Gunnersbury Park, I put on Beethoven’s Ninth and experience a kind of joy…. Music has never affected me like this before. Is it connected to my calamitous reversal of fortune? It feels that way.”

It had been, he admitted, “the worst year of my life. But weirdly, I’ve never been happier.”

Whether this was true or bravado, it was a sign that Young was fighting back – a trend that would continue over the next couple of years. The headlines of his Spectator columns, no longer about education, were revealing here: “The Academics who dare not speak their name”; “Will making jokes about vegans soon be a hate crime?” and “Why are faceless accusations allowed to end men’s careers?” It was clear – and perhaps inevitable - he had a new enemy (or enemies) in sight.

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It was also to be expected that Young – as his father’s son – would do more than just write about it. In February 2020, directed by his own experience of the “Two Minutes’ Hate”, Young founded the Free Speech Union. The Union would offer legal aid and advice to anyone who’d been no-platformed, targeted by a digital outrage mob, or investigated/fired by their workplace for breaching a speech code.

“Regardless of your profession,” the website said, “or whether you’re a student or a retiree, we may come to your defence if you find yourself under attack for exercising your legal right to free speech, whether by the courts or the police, by your employer, by colleagues or activists, or by outrage mobs on social media and elsewhere.”

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Needless to say, there was barracking from the usual quarters. Comedian Stewart Lee in the Guardian kvetched that what Young really wanted “isn’t a Free Speech Union. He wants a Freedom from Consequences of Speech Union and a credible-sounding caption for his BBC appearances.” He went on, spitefully, to describe Young as “a tragic fly, floating on flimsy wings of unearned privilege and family connections, banging repeatedly into the same window pane of failure, all the while wishing he were the soaring eagle of legend…”

Another Guardian piece (3 March) dismissed the new union under the racialised heading, “Why Toby Young and other robust white men are using free speech to whip universities.”  And in the same newspaper, an article by Joel Golby accused Young of exploiting “a groundswell of sub-100 follower Twitter accounts who are made they can’t drop the N-word online and still keep their jobs.”

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All these comments, all from the same august publication, turned out to be wide of the mark. In fact, the story of the FSU has been one of success – it now has, according to a 2022 end of year report, 12,200 members (among them 250 UK authors). It has, in its three-year existence, also supported a significant amount of them (2,000 was the figure quoted recently by Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch) in their cases against no-platforming, disciplinary procedures at work or unfair dismissal. The FSU organises “speakeasy” events all over the country, has instituted a grants system for individuals aged 16-30 who wish to promote free speech, gives members support in crowdfunding legal actions they may need to bring, or connects them with legal firms that will only charge them if the case is won.

This year they have campaigned for banks to make a “free speech commitment” (following the debankings of Nigel Farage and others for their political views) and have set up web pages advising on “What to do if you’re debanked.” They also claim some credit for the removal of particularly draconian clauses in the Government’s new Online Safety Bill. One could quote numerous other such examples over the last three years – it’s clear that the FSU does provide not only a significant bulwark against those who would curtail free speech rights,  but also a genuine source of support for those in trouble, a place to turn for help and advice where none existed before.

But the clearest sign of the FSU’s success has been that so many people have heard of it and know of its existence: it has, arguably, become part of the landscape of modern Britain.  There was a clear demand for such a service, and if Young hadn’t set it up himself then someone else, sooner or later, would surely have had to. But he did.

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A resurgence then for Young – the FSU, along with his website the Daily Sceptic (the successor to Lockdown Sceptics, founded during the Covid crisis of 2020), have returned him to the public eye in ways which may have made his opponents regret not simply leaving him in the world of education. The last laugh, at the time of writing, is his.

But there is a serious side to these things, and there are serious points to be made. Let it be written, in flames a mile high if need be,  exactly what happened to Toby Young in January 2018. Someone perceived as time-wasting, frivolous and even destructive had made painstaking attempts to reform himself and, with his Free Schools initiative, do something useful with his life. He had largely succeeded.

His opponents’ response, instead of encouraging him, had been to do everything they could to sabotage and destroy him. Nobody knows how many more schools would have been opened, how many more children might have had their horizons or life-possibilities raised, had he continued to work in this field. Equally incalculable is how many of them will have poorer lives and futures because the Left, in this instance, got their scalp.

They had, in the process, hurt themselves too, looking at best humourless, literal-minded and shatteringly obtuse, and at worst duplicitous and corrupt. But they had done something rather more depressing to the rest of us. They had brought home the extent to which we were now living in a hazardous new world. It was a place where our enemies, out of political expediency, could hold up our every joke and throwaway comment to scrutiny - as though they were delivered with a sepulchral seriousness and a moral intent they were never intended to have.

In this new unforgiving world - it had also been spelt out - there was no real possibility of redemption or Damascene self-amendment. Attempts to improve yourself were futile: someone, somewhere would find something you once had said or done, and send you back to base. Perhaps the most meaningful arc in a person’s life was thus negated. If you couldn’t evolve, if you were defined forever by your darkest moments, you might as well give up.

It’s a piece of luck they didn’t ultimately succeed with Young and that the narrative, though truncated, has a second act. It remains to be seen what he will do in future, though one can expect Young to be in the soup more than once along the way. One can also expect him to brush himself down – sometimes painfully and laboriously – and carry on.

Whether Toby Young is a good man or not will continue to divide people as long as he remains in public life. He has his loyal supporters and equally virulent foes. But – frustratingly for the second group, and despite all their attempts five years ago – there’s clearly no keeping him down.

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POSTSCRIPT – PETER WILBY 2023

This summer came an interesting coda to the events of 2018, involving Peter Wilby, the journalist who at the time had publicly accused Young of disgracing his father Michael Young’s memory. Young subsequently described Wilby’s comment as one of the very worst moments of his ordeal: “It was as if he was taking me aside into a dark room, handing me a glass of whisky and a revolver and telling me to do the decent thing.”

In August 2023, Wilby himself was convicted on three charges of making and viewing indecent images of children, 22 of which were Category A, the most serious kind. He was sentenced to ten months in prison, suspended for two years. The New Statesman, of which Wilby was editor from 1998 to 2005, declared themselves “shocked and appalled to learn of these horrifying crimes.”

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Young discussed the affair in a Spectator column on 26 August. “According to the ancient proverb,” he began, “if you sit by the river for long enough you will see the body of your enemy float by.”

His first reaction to the news, Young said, was one of “complete bewilderment.”

“How could this eminent liberal journalist who regularly denounced right-wing sinners from his pulpit in the left-wing media have been harbouring such a shameful secret? When writing about the mote in my eye, why didn’t he pause to examine the beam in his own?... Is that why Peter accused me of being addicted to pornography? When he said I’d disgraced my father, was he thinking of his own father’s reaction if his behaviour ever came to light?”

Young finished: “I remember feeling a red-hot burning shame when I read Peter’s condemnation of me. Next time, I’ll know better.”