Hello and this is the show for you if you're bored of watching people arguing on

the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At trigonometry we don't pretend

to be the experts, we ask the experts.

Our amazing guest this week is a fantastic classical liberal journalist, Toby Young.

Welcome to Trigonometry.

Thanks for having me on the show.

And I introduced you as a journalist. How did you first

first get into journalists.

Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, I first started writing for newspapers of magazines when I was a student.

I was commended in the category of young

journalist of the year in god 1985 and and when I left university I became a news trainee at the times.

And that was my first kind of proper job in journalism.

I actually lost that job after six months.

And the reason for that was because every morning

I would come in and try and log on to the in-house computer system as Charlie Wilson,

then the editor-in-chief of the times and how much access you had to the kind of in-house

computer system depended on your status in the office hierarchy.

Because I was a news training, I was at the bottom of the pecking order and really had access to nothing so I would try

and log in as the editor and always get access to everything and we would try and guess his

password for kind of five or ten minutes every morning and after about five and a half months I hit on the right one which was

top man and the first thing I had this very kind of supercilious boss who had this kind of very languid air, long hair, lots of girlfriends,

...