Toby Young’s House of Lords Diary

Mace | 24th March 2026 | Comment, Magazine
Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
Photo by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

With invitations coming in to speak at the 2026 autumn party conference season, freedom of speech campaigner Toby Young reflects on his political status 'upgrade' from hack to in-demand peer on the fringe circuit.

I’ve just started getting invitations to the 2026 party conference season. Only this year, with five political parties all polling (YouGov, March 11) within 10% of each other and the Tories (at 19%) catching up Reform (23%) on the inside rail, it’s looking like it could be an exhausting two month season.

Attending the Tory party conference last year as a new Conservative peer, as opposed to a lowly hack, was definitely  an upgrade. I was asked to do two events on the main stage, which was a first, although not altogether flattering. The Times sketch writer noted that there were only three people in the audience when I addressed the party faithful on Sunday and reminded his readers that I’d once written a book called The Sound of No Hands Clapping. 

Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed being a gamekeeper rather than an ink-stained poacher. My hotel room was considerably nicer.   The hardest thing about becoming a peer is the number of rules you’ve got to master. I feel like a new boy at the world’s oldest and stuffiest public school. It’s the steepest learning curve I’ve been on and I speak as someone who was plucked from Fleet Street obscurity to work as an editor at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s and then hired as an untested screenwriter by Joel Silver, the most powerful producer in Hollywood, to write a picture. (It didn’t get made.)

I attended a series of induction sessions shortly …

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