Toby Young

Oprah Winfrey, peddler of New Age nonsense (Photo: AP)

Thank God Oprah Winfrey has brought her ghastly talk show to an end. So gargantuan is her ego, she announced two years ago that it would end this year. This was supposedly because 2011 was the show’s 25th anniversary. “Twenty-five years feels right in my bones, and it feels right in my spirit – it’s the perfect number, the exact right time,” she said. In truth, it was because the show’s ratings had been steadily declining for the last 10 years, plummeting from a peak of 14 million in 1998 to 7.3 million in 2008.

The final show itself rivalled the Academy Awards for pomposity and self-importance, with fawning A-list celebrities trying to outbid each other in lachrymose praise. Madona called her an… Read More

Carmen Callil on Roth: 'It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe'

What a prize chump Carmen Callil is. The feminist publisher, one of three judges of this year’s Mann Booker international prize, has resigned in a huff over the decision to award the prize to Philip Roth. She’s perfectly entitled to dispute the decision, but she should have done so in private, not in public. She’s not a Supreme Court Justice, for heaven’s sake. When a person agrees to join a literary judging panel, he or she implicitly agrees to be bound by the majority verdict. To dissent in public, as Callil has done, robs the prize of much of its value. Instead of the prize being awarded… Read More

Is the Labour Party about to embrace free schools? I shared a platform yesterday with Labour’s shadow education secretary at GovNet’s Education 2011 conference and he welcomed the free school that Peter Hyman is setting up in Newham. Here’s the relevant passage from Andy Burnham’s speech:
While I have real concerns about the national programme, it does not follow that Labour will be opposed to every free school.

We recognise that they are being set up by people with a genuine desire to improve education who are working within the options available to them …

Some proposals, like Peter Hyman’s, are comprehensive, committed to fair admissions, and have the full backing of their local area.
This is in marked contrast to Burnham’s attitude to free schools six months ago when the Guardian characterised his position as “fiercely opposed”. In an interview with the paper, he said there was a “major ideological… Read More

Dominique Strauss-Kahn stands with his laywer Benjamin Brafman (Photo: Getty)

The story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s fall from grace is awfully reminiscent of the fate suffered by Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Like the Wall Street banker, the IMF chief is a self-styled “Master of the Universe” – a member of the world’s financial elite. Much of the drama and comedy of the novel arises out of the contrast between McCoy’s multi-million dollar lifestyle – the Park Avenue apartment, the social x-ray wife, the lubricious mistress – and the New York criminal justice system. McCoy suddenly finds himself in a hostile universe in which his status as a Wall Street muckety-muck is no longer an asset, it’s a huge disadvantage. As his Irish-American lawyer Tommy Killan… Read More

Can I urge all those concerned about the financial mess Britain was left in by the last Government to attend the Rally Against Debt tomorrow at the Old Palace Yard in Westminster? It kicks off at 11am and speakers include Nigel Farage MEP, Guido Fawkes, Bill Cash MP, Martin Durkin, Matthew Sinclair and Priti Patel MP.

Estimates of the size of the national debt vary, depending on who’s doing the counting. According to the Taxpayers’ Alliance, it comes to £7.9 trillion if you include unfunded public sector pensions, but even the Office for National Statistics says that general government debt was £1,105.8 billion at the end of 2010. So that’s 76.1% of GDP even on the most conservative estimate.  The cost of servicing the debt in 2010-11 was £43 billion, the size of the defence budget. This is projected to rise to £73.8 billion in 2014-15, roughly the… Read More

Definitely dodgy

The Chilcot inquiry has released a number of documents today that were previously kept secret, including a letter from a senior intelligence official that flatly contradicts Alastair Campbell’s evidence to the inquiry. Major General Michael Laurie, a former director general in the Defence Intelligence Staff, says that the intelligence dossier that purportedly showed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was drawn up with the purpose of making the case for war, something that Campbell explicitly denied.

“I am writing to comment on the position taken by Alastair Campbell during his evidence to you … when he stated that the purpose of the dossier was not to make a case for war,” he says. “I and those involved in its production saw it exactly as that, and that was the direction we were given. Alastair Campbell said to… Read More

I was pleased to learn that Peter Hyman, Tony Blair’s former director of strategy and the Newsnight regular, is setting up a free school in Newham. According to an exclusive in tomorrow’s Spectator, he’s doing this with the full backing of Andrew Adonis, the chief engineer of Tony Blair’s City Academies programme. Just to complete the roster of New Labour movers and shakers, one of Hyman’s partners in the venture is Oli de Botton who was a member of David Miliband’s leadership campaign team. This confirms my belief that if Miliband Snr had won last year instead of his less intelligent younger brother, Labour would now be foursquare behind the Coalition’s education reforms.

For those of us involved in setting up free schools and campaigning for education reform, this is excellent news. It confirms something most of us have know for some time, namely, that few people are willing to… Read More

MPs are debating an amendment to the Education Bill in the House of Commons this afternoon which would allow selective independent schools to continue to select pupils according to ability if they become academies. The amendment was tabled by Graham Brady, the MP who resigned from the Conservative front bench after David Cameron ruled out creating any more grammar schools, and is being backed by 38 MPs, not all of them Tories. If it’s passed, it could pave the way for the creation of hundreds of new selective schools in the state sector.

Most people’s views on this issue will be dictated by their feelings about grammar schools, but there are two good reasons for supporting this amendment even if you share the Prime Minister’s skepticism about them.

First, it could mean that hundreds of high-performing schools will apply to convert to academy status rather than remain in the independent sector…. Read More

Our bloggers mark the Coalition’s birthday with a snapshot verdict

Verdict 7/10: It would have been better if the Conservatives had won an outright majority at the last election, but a coalition with the Lib Dems was the best outcome in the circumstances. I doubt the Party would be in such a strong position after one year of minority government or some sort of confidence and supply arrangement. I’m disappointed that some of the policies in the Tory manifesto, such as cutting inheritance tax, have been junked, but pleased that the Lib Dems have supported the Conservatives’ most important policy, namely, eliminating the structural deficit in the lifetime of this Parliament. I was relieved when Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State for Education and have been impressed by his steadfastness. With the exception of Nick Clegg, he has taken more hostile fire… Read More

Even young people are drifting Right (T-shirtfrom zazzle.co.uk)

Tempting though it is to blame Ed Miliband for Labour’s poor performance in the local and regional elections, I doubt Labour would have fared much better under another leader. As David Goodhart pointed out in The Independent, Labour’s success has traditionally been dependent on an alliance between the traditional working-class and middle-class liberals and that coalition has now collapsed:
Labour has lost around 4 million working-class voters since 1997, and at the last general election, for the first time, Labour’s middle-class vote (in the ABC1 sense) was higher than its working-class (C2DE) vote. To win an election, Labour needs to win back lots of those blue-collar voters; the trouble is that Labour’s middle-class voters, especially the liberal graduates among them, have increasingly divergent value… Read More