His father was born in Yurevich, near Minsk, a village that is now in Belarus but was then largely populated by Lithuanian Jews, including Young's own family.

Having qualified as a solicitor, Young practised for only a year, after which he joined Great Universal Stores as an executive, working for part of that time as an assistant to the chairman, Sir Isaac Wolfson.

After the property crash of 1973–1974, Young assisted Jeffrey Sterling to reverse his company into T&CP to form a group that later became P&O.

[4] Young became involved in voluntary organisations as chairman of the vocational training charity British ORT; he was made a director of the CPS in 1979 shortly after the general election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power.

On the first day of the new government, Keith Joseph, the Secretary of State for Industry, appointed him his advisor responsible for what later became known as privatisation.

[6] One month later, on 11 September it was announced that Young was to enter the cabinet as Minister without Portfolio (the first person to hold the role since Lord Aberdare in 1974) to advise the government on unemployment issues.

Thatcher regarded Young as personally loyal to her and decided in March 1987 to put him into a central role in planning the 1987 election campaign, in effect to keep an eye on Norman Tebbit whom she suspected to be more interested in advancing his claims on the leadership.

[7] Following the election Tebbit announced his retirement from the government, and Young was promoted to Secretary of State for Trade and Industry.

He resigned from the Cabinet in 1989 but received an appointment as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party to help Kenneth Baker reorganise Central Office.

They acquired the port by obtaining a loan from Rogosin Industries, a public company they controlled, which raised the money by issuing bonds.

[12] In June 2010, Young was chosen by PM David Cameron to advise on health and safety laws:[13] To investigate and report back to the Prime Minister on the rise of the compensation culture over the last decade coupled with the current low standing that health and safety legislation now enjoys and to suggest solutions.

Young said that part of the responsibility lay with the EU's 1989 Framework Directive, which made risk assessments compulsory across all occupations, whether hazardous or not.

In October 2010, he was appointed enterprise adviser to Cameron, and was asked to conduct a "brutal" review of the relationship of government to small firms.

[25][26] Young had a number of pro bono or charitable interests including the presidency of Chai Cancer Care and the Coram Trust, chairman of the Chichester Festival Theatre and of the Jewish Museum London, and trustee of the Co-Existence Trust and the MBI Al Jaber Foundation.