The Joke: Part Five

The show-trial and public execution of journalist Toby Young

1

Young’s reputation, clearly, was imploding before us. But what of the Labour Party and their fellow-travellers on the benches opposite? Did they honestly think Young was, in Paula Sheriff’s phrase, “this misogynist man who thinks it’s appropriate to constantly tweet about women’s breasts and race and masturbate over starving children?” Few MPs could honestly have thought the picture they’d so assiduously painted was a realistic one.

Why were they doing this? Why did they pull out all the stops and humiliate themselves before the British Public to see Young off the premises?

2

First there was the whole matter of Free Schools, an idea which continues to generate both controversy and brutal, cut-throat politics. Opponents claim they are wasteful, relatively unregulated, socially divisive and a drain on public money sorely needed by state schools. Defenders stress parental choice and claim that, far from harming state-run schools, they actually work to drive up standards. Divisions on the matter seem insoluble, and Young’s efforts had clearly made him as many enemies as friends.

3

Yet there was surely something else to it too: that very English sneer at people who get up and have a go at changing things, willing them to fail lest they turn into too bitter a reminder of your own inertia. There was also, you suspected, a kind of snobbery here, a sense that someone who hadn’t paid their dues on the virtue-signalling front was daring to steal a march on those who had.

4

But there were other possible reasons. In 2013 Young had made some ill-advised and glib comments about the teaching profession. “Teachers,” he said, “complain a lot about how tough their job is. But you know, the day begins in most schools at nine o’clock, ends at 3.30 pm. They have six weeks’ holiday during the summer, two weeks’ holiday at Easter and at Christmas. Yes, they don’t just work when they’re at school but even so, compared to a lot of other jobs, it’s not that tough.”

Young, a few years later, rowed back on these comments, saying he regretted being “dismissive about workload complaints” and adding that he now knew “how hard teachers work and what a difficult job it is.”

Yet teachers themselves tended to remember the first remarks and not the later disclaimer. It would be instructive to know, of the 210,000 signatures on Change.Org calling for his removal from the Office for Students, how many originated from that profession. One would imagine a very high proportion of them had signed and could be mobilised by the NUT en bloc.

5

Then there was the little business of Young’s application to join the Labour Party in 2015. This wasn’t Young’s Conservatism wobbling – he admitted it was a case of pure entryism, that he intended to vote for Jeremy Corbyn as leader, thereby “consign[ing] Labour to electoral oblivion” (the words he’d written on his application, which unsurprisingly got rejected).

“Political combat isn’t a bantamweight boxing match,” Young explained, in words he may now have come to regret. “It’s Ultimate Fighting – hit first, hit hard, and hit often.”

6

There was another factor too, perhaps the main one. It emerged from his post-defenestration interview with James Delingpole, in July 2018, where Young explained why he’d wanted the position at the Office for Students in the first place. “There are lots of things wrong with the British university sector,” he said. “Free Speech in peril. There is rampant grade inflation. Vice Chancellors are paid far more than they should be. University fees are too high. There are lots of universities which furnish graduates with almost worthless degrees. So I think there’s a lot this regulator needs to do.”

Young with his free school has already proved himself energetic and able to get things done in the face of opposition. You could see why those benefitting from the status quo might do what they could to stop him.

7

Dawn Butler, at any rate, could claim a victory in the Parliamentary Question Session – few of her comments had not been taken at face value and run with.

It had been slighter trickier for Butler when she’d appeared on Julia Hartley Brewer’s Talk Radio programme earlier that morning, where there had been a telling exchange.

Hartley-Brewer pointed out that, whatever Toby Young’s background or tweeting history, the Labour Party would surely have objected to his appointment anyway purely on the grounds that he was a Tory.

“I didn’t know he was a Tory,” said Butler unconvincingly.

Hartley Brewer went on to point out Young’s achievements, in particular his setting up a free school where a third of the kids were on free school meals. “He didn’t go off and send his kids to private school… In what way does he not have a good enough background in education to promote social mobility, a key issue in education these days?”

Butler stonewalled, replying that she didn’t know that much about the free schools or how well they’d done. “I can’t tell you all of that.”

Hartley Brewer seemed genuinely shocked. “Do you not…? Wait a minute, Dawn! You’ve got an opinion whether someone should be or should not be one of the universities’ regulators board-members, and you’re saying he’s unfit for this because you’ve seen a few of his tweets? But you haven’t bothered to take the time to see what the argument is for why he should be on there. Don’t you think that’s a bit of a strange opinion to have?”

“No no,” replied Butler smoothly. “Not at all.”

7

On 9 January, the Guardian newspaper made an important announcement.

Toby Young resigns from the Office for Students after backlash. Resignation comes less than 24 hours after minister issued robust defence of Young’s position in the House of Commons….

In a statement posted on the Spectator website on Tuesday morning, Young, a champion of free schools, said: “My appointment has become a distraction from its vital work of broadening access to higher education and defending academic freedom.”

The Office for Students (Ofs) chair, Sir Michael Barber, welcomed the news, which came after a backlash against the appointment, with questions asked about Young’s suitability for the role. Barber said Young had “reached the right conclusion.”

8

Young’s resignation may have been linked to a piece - the most damaging yet – which appeared in Private Eye and London Student on the same day. It was written by two student journalists, Ben Van Der Merwe and Emma Yeomans, who alleged that Young had attended a secret eugenics event at the London Conference on Intelligence. They also wrote that the conference was “dominated by a secretive group of white supremacists with neo-Nazi links.”

It went on in similar tone. The writers namechecked, among others, the “white nationalist, extremist Richard Lynn, who has called for the ‘phasing out’ of the populations of incompetent cultures” and Emil Kirkegaard, who had attended all four conferences and was “an apologist for child rape.” There were some incriminating details, not least some deeply unsavoury quotes from a Kirkegaard blog about sex with sleeping children being a possible “compromise” for paedophiles. They also said that many speakers at this conference (at least conferences organised in 2015 & 2016) had written for the magazines UNZ and Mankind Quarterly, which had links to white nationalist organisations. And of course, they said that Young had been there.

9

Young would claim in his Spectator piece two days later (claims we will examine in part two) that he had visited said conference only for a few hours, had sat at the back, was there strictly as a journalist, and had done it to gather anecdotal material for a conference in Canada later that year.

He also stated he knew neither anyone there, nor their work. Reports that this “revelation” had led to his resigning from the Office for Students were, he said, “balls.” He had stood down in the hope that, if he apologized, the lynch-mob would relent and he could keep his other positions, particularly those linked to free schools. Instead, he said, “it has reached a new, frenzied pitch. The mob’s blood lust is up and it won’t rest until it has completely destroyed me.”