“Unlike Christianity, Woke-ism Is a Religion Without Forgiveness”

Celia Walden interviewed me last week and has written it up for today’s Telegraph. Here’s how it begins:

“Whenever I find myself worrying about becoming too successful,” deadpans Lord Young of Acton, a twitch at the corner of his mouth threatening to give way to laughter, “I just think: ‘Any moment now, another scandal will come along to engulf you’. That usually does the trick.”

I’ve been congratulating the journalist, writer and Conservative peer on the success of his Free Speech Union (FSU) – founded in 2020 to combat “cancel culture” – as it celebrates two significant milestones.

As of last week, the FSU has more than 45,000 members. But perhaps more importantly, the organisation – which offers advice and legal referrals to members who have been disciplined or dismissed by employers over speech-related issues – has now fought more than 6,000 cases. “We’re getting about 45 requests for help a week at the moment,” the 62-year-old tells me. “Last week, we had an all-time record: 20 requests for help on a single day.”

And it’s amazing how effective simply threatening to go to the law or complain to a regulator can be, he insists. “If they think there’s going to be an even scarier mob on the other side,” he grins, “one that’s going to give them even more grief, then they will often back down.”

It’s mid-morning on a Monday and we’re sitting in a shady corner of his sun-scorched back garden in west London, drinking flat whites. Young’s dog, Mali, is nestled against his thigh. (Mali’s a Cavapoochon, which, when explained to a stranger in a park recently, elicited the response: “Bless you”.)

Through the French windows, his wife, Caroline – who is an account manager for a luxury travel PR company – is on a Zoom call at the kitchen table, and although all four of their children still live at home, I only see one, who slopes in from a big night out towards the end of our interview.

I haven’t seen Young in three or four years, but somehow he looks more youthful than he did then, certainly fitter, in a fine, pinstriped shirt and sunglasses. And while he’s always had an infectious energy, he seems particularly perky today, buoyed up, no doubt, by this recent success.

But there’s a potential brand conflict for him, isn’t there? After all, for most of his adult life, Young has sold himself as a professional failure. An expert persona non grata who has, by his own admission, been sacked from every job he’s had – most famously from US Vanity Fair by its erstwhile editor, Graydon Carter, who was subsequently depicted as a “lovable, wisecracking tyrant” in Young’s biting 2001 memoir, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People. If these figures continue to escalate, however, and the FSU becomes an unqualified success, Young might find himself in need of a rebrand.

We banter about this a while (banter still being allowed in this safest of spaces), before Young grows serious. The FSU wasn’t born of journalistic posturing. It didn’t come from a frivolous, attention-seeking place, but the very real, very personal experience of being cancelled.

The year was 2018. Having co-founded the West London Free School (the first of a new type of state school independent of local authorities) in 2011 and taken on directorship of the New Schools Network (a charity to support groups setting up free schools) five years later, Young had become something of a poster boy for the then-government’s plan to introduce the schools. Which suited him fine.

With four children under 12 in 2011 – Sasha, now 23; Ludo, 21; Freddie, 19; and Charlie, 18 – Young had developed strong beliefs around education, beliefs that could be pared down to: “traditional subjects taught in a traditional way”; no more faddy, non-subjects like “mindfulness”; and “more time spent learning about the kings and queens of England”, but also a reassertion of teachers’ authority. So when Theresa May asked him, in late 2017, to join the board of the newly established Office for Students – the independent regulator for higher education in England – Young jumped at the chance.

The massive public backlash came as a surprise, he admits today. A pitchfork mob trawled through Young’s Twitter history, as well as his extensive journalistic back catalogue, looking for some “problematic” tweet, distasteful joke or clumsy turn of phrase with which to end his career. As Young says now: “When you’ve been a professional journalist for 35-plus years, it’s not going to be hard for the offence archaeologists to find things to shame you.”

Worth reading in full.