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. A graduate of the University of Oxford, Young briefly worked for The Times, before co-founding the London magazine Modern Review in 1991. He edited it until financial difficulties led to its demise in 1995. 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. 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. In 2020, press regulator Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) found Young to have promoted misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic in a Daily Telegraph column. Early life Born in Buckinghamshire, Young was brought up in Highgate, North London, and in South Devon. 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, a C in English Literature, and