After a tabloid-scale blow-up with columnist and writer Julie Burchill and her then lover Charlotte Raven that closed the iconoclastic 90s magazine The Modern Review, Toby Young moved on to “conquer” New York. Five years later, sacked from Vanity Fair (and elsewhere), he grabbed a kind of victory, publishing the best-selling tale of his failure, How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.

More recently Young penned and acted in a play about The Spectator magazine’s “summer of love” when, for a while at least, the crusty old organ became a hotbed of uncontrolled shagging.

We caught up with Toby for another virtual latte.