Media Masters - Toby Young

Toby Young is a writer, social commentator - and one of the most provocative voices in Britain. In his thirty years in journalism, he founded The Modern Review with Julie Burchill in 1991, has spent over two decades at The Spectator, and is associate editor at Quillette magazine. His memoir of time spent at Vanity Fair in New York, ‘How To Lose Friends and Alienate People’ was turned into a Hollywood film. In this in-depth interview, Toby argues that the government-enforced lockdown has failed to balance public health with science and the sustainability of the economy, and his motivation to campaign against these “disproportionate measures;” contends that so-called ‘cancel culture’ is a “resurgence of Puritanism,” and recalls his own ‘cancellation’ when he “lost five jobs to the Twitter mob;” his experience encouraged him to set up the Free Speech Union to support those who are, in his opinion, fellow victims of the rising precariousness of free speech.