The Joke: Part Two

The show-trial and public execution of journalist Toby Young

1

You only needed to read the Twitter comments that night (or early morning) to get a taste of what was coming.

In response to the Guardian headline “Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator,” one user tweeted: “Only 13 minutes into 2018 and bad news already.”

Another: “Fuckwit appointment of a fuckwit by fuckwits.”

And simply: “No. No. No.”

It was twenty past three in the morning. Young went to bed hoping it would all blow over. As these things generally did.

2

This one didn’t. Two tweets in particular stoked up the kindling the next day. One was from David Lammy MP – rarely a generous man to his opponents – who that evening wrote the following:

“Is that Toby Young who said I was wrong to criticise Oxbridge for failing to improve access? …Toby Young who slated working class students? I thought it was New Year’s Day not April Fool’s Day.”

The comment was retweeted 7,360 times and liked 16,000.

3

The second tweet, a couple of hours later, came from Corbyn-supporting journalist Paul Mason:

“Toby @toadmeister Young despises working class kids who try to make good through education. That’s why the Tories have put him on a body responsible for regulating higher education.”

In response another user, @JoRichardsKent:

“Why is such a “man” going to be in such a position of responsibility and of hiring and firing? Women judged by, and picked out for comment, based on BREAST size.”

4

We will come onto the point about “access” later on. Regarding Lammy’s comment about Young’s having “slated” working class students or Mason’s accusation that Young despised them, both were presumably referring to a passage from a book called The Oxford Myth, published no less than 30 years before. In what was a palpable send-up, Young had talked about the ways Oxford had let down his Brideshead fantasies of finding “English county families baying for broken glass.” Instead, as he wrote, he found “small, vaguely deformed undergraduates” who “would scuttle across the quad as if carrying mobile homes on their backs. Replete with acne and anoraks, they would peer up through thick pebble-glasses, pausing only to blow their noses.”

It was a piece of writing designed to amuse, written in the style of the times (as we shall see). Taken out of context, treated with a seriousness it never demanded, it read rather differently.

But what about that last tweet from @JoRichardsKent, the one about breasts and “BREAST size”?

We were about to find out.

5

On 2 January, the headlines about Young in the broadsheets were mainly political. But by the following day, the nature of these had changed. The same paper was now printing Young’s past tweets about women’s breasts: most from 2009, over 8 years earlier, and well before Young’s free school had opened.

13 Mar 2009: Toby Young @toadmeister – What happened to Winkleman’s breasts Put on some weight, girlie. #comicrelief

9 July 2009: Barry Isaacson@BarryJI – Top Chef announced, elegant pub pic, @toadmeister’s hand on Padma’s bottom, Padma looks surprised but pleased.

9 July 2009: Toby Young @toadmeister, replying to @BarryIJ – Actually mate, I had my dick up her arse.

24 Oct 2009: Toby Young @toadmeister – In hotel room with five-months pregnant Padma. Her boobs are MASSIVE. Be careful what you wish for…

10 Dec 2009: Toby Young @toadmeister – Do Padma’s breasts look bigger than normal? I think they do. #tcparty.

And in 2012 (date unspecified), during PMQs: Serious cleavage behind @Ed_Miliband’s head. Anyone know who it belongs to? #PMQs

Separated by several months, even years, they seemed like the throwaway remarks of someone in a boorish mood. But grouped together on one page, digested in seconds, the comments made Young look in a permanent state of nudge-nudge-wink-wink overdrive, as though he could barely have a thought without nipples or D-cups bobbing up in it.

6

By the end of day 3 Young had deleted 50,000 of his tweets. It didn’t matter that this figure represented all tweets between two certain dates – Young was a prolific Tweeter – and that the vast majority would probably have been anodyne. What mattered was what the press made of it. “Toby Young deletes thousands of tweets amidst row over his university regulator appointment” (The Independent); “Toby Young ‘deletes 50,000 old tweets’ after sexism criticism.” (Talk Radio).

Young’s great tweet-dump didn’t change the situation in any way. Records and screenshots had been made and were now trawled out. His articles at the Spectator archive were, that January, the most searched for in the magazine’s 200-year history. Nor were they being read by friendly eyes.

7

It was part of Young’s bad luck at this time that, three months earlier, condemnation of his tweets would have had far less purchase.

But following Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s exposure in November 2017 as a serial sexual harasser and rapist, the MeToo and TimesUp movements had exploded across the internet. Women were showing zero-tolerance to anything that smacked of sexism, and an equal number of men, out of self-preservation, were frantic to distance themselves from the same.

Young’s tweets started to trend with the #MeToo and #TimesUp hashtags beside them.

The hashtags were a gruesome turn of events in a week full of them.

8

If a concerted hit job were being done on Young by his political opponents, there were at least two outlets they could rely on to help: the Guardian and the New Statesman (actually, as it turned out, they could rely on many more, across the political spectrum).

In the New Statesman that day there duly appeared an article by a writer called Sian Norris. Under the headline “Toby Young’s ‘caustic wit’ isn’t funny and it sends a terrible message on sexual harassment.”  was the subheading “Young once wrote about having his ‘dick’ up a colleague’s arse.’”

Below was an exhaustive list of his “crimes” against political correctness, ending with a call to arms from Norris herself: “If May and her government are truly committed to eliminating prejudice and discrimination, perhaps they could start by swapping this sneering sexist with a feminist who understands both higher education and equality. Women students – women everywhere – deserve nothing less.”

Meanwhile Sky News, to lead the TV prosecution against Young, had – cruellest of all - invited on Guardian columnist Owen Jones.

9

It was not the first time Owen Jones and Toby Young had crossed paths with each other. The two have often been paired together on news programmes when a left-wing and right-wing commentator go head to head. Owen Jones is a hate-figure for the Right, Toby Young a hate-figure for the Left. With their 2+1 syllable names, they seemed part of each other’s karma, joined together for all eternity. At the same time, they have completely opposed value systems and appear to loathe each other. Perhaps they will do a podcast together some day. Perhaps not.  

These chapters are in part about why and how the Left hate Toby Young. But why do the Right dislike Owen Jones? He can be, for his enemies, a poisonously divisive character – a baby-faced public prosecutor and cheerleader, a homegrown blend of Animal Farm’s Squealer and the Soviet Terror’s Vyshinsky, out to shame his opponents until they crack or crawl away.

For the hatchet-job today Jones had girded his loins and put on his most serious face: seriously worn down by the seriousness of events at this serious, serious time.

The appointment of Young to the Office for Students, he said to the presenter, reeked “of Tory nepotism. Young’s appointment was a sign of how the country worked, Jones said. Clearly in the UK, Jones spluttered, “People of very limited ability, because of who they know, can make it to powerful positions.”

10

He moved on to Young’s past misdemeanours in print. Young, he thundered, had “described disabled children as ‘illiterate troglodytes with a mental age of six years old.” He had “called for eugenics to be used, to be deployed, with children.”  

Then he moved onto Young’s online misdemeanours. Toby Young, Jones said, had:

 “…OBSESSIVELY leered over women’s breasts. Countless women. Politicians. Celebrities…I can’t really say many of them on national television I’ve just realised, because they’re so OUTRAGEOUS. Sexual, HORRENDOUS sexual descriptions of women and what he’d like to do to them. This is a man who has made EXCEPTIONALLY bigoted comments repeatedly, as a grown man in his forties, who’s been appointed to this position simply because he’s a conservative pundit.”  

11

One could take issue here with Owen Jones on a number of points. Had Young really described disabled children as ‘illiterate troglodytes with a mental age of six’? Not really, as we will see. Had he “obsessively leered over women’s breasts?” A few tweets nearly all from nine years back. Were his “sexual descriptions” of women really “horrendous?”

Had Jones’s denunciation of Young happened a few years later, there would of course have been an effective, two-word riposte which could have given Jones a moment’s pause.

The two words were ‘Russell Brand.’

12

In September 2023, over five years after the events described here, Dispatches on Channel 4 broadcast an exposé of the comedian Russell Brand, backed up by a long report in the Sunday Times. In it, allegations were made that Russell Brand had committed rape and sexual assault, and had had an abusive dalliance with a 16 year-old schoolgirl (‘Alice’) when he himself was 30.

The documentary made depressing viewing, intercutting Alice’s tale of an exploitative relationship with graphic jokes Brand had made on stage apparently referring to it - wisecracks about Brand’s penchant for fellatio that made his partner’s mascara run or that choked her (‘Alice’ spoke of the same, in rather less comical terms). There were comments too from Brand about the joys of spitting on your partner during sex – all accompanied by a horror-film soundtrack provided by Channel 4.

12

None of these things should have come as much surprise. Brand had written two ultra-candid autobiographies: My Booky Wook (2007) and Booky Wook 2 (2010) . In both he had described an epically unfettered sex life and spoke of approaching the women he wanted to sleep with ‘like a harassed secretary confronting a bothersome franking machine.’ In 2008 he had quit the BBC after taunting the elderly actor Andrew Sachs – egged on and abetted by presenter Jonathan Ross – about having slept with Sachs’s granddaughter when she was 20 years old. He’d also, some time earlier, broadcast regarding a Radio 2 presenter he was fantasizing about, threatening: ‘We are going to get under that desk, and we’re going to unleash hell on your thighs, woman.”

The question one might reasonably ask was why, when Young’s sophomoric comments - almost prim and blushing by comparison - were judged so harshly by Jones, had Brand escaped condemnation? Was he not voicing rather more graphic “horrendous sexual descriptions of women and what he'd like to do to them?” Was it simply a political matter?

13

Because clearly neither he nor the British Left were bothered by Brand’s behaviour at the time, when both took him up and made him a kind of mascot for the cause. Brand was given a weekly column on the Guardian from 2006 to 2009 and invited to guest-edit the New Statesman in October 2013. Guardian columnist George Monbiot named Brand one of the “Heroes of 2014”, and the following year Owen Jones published a piece in which he rhapsodized about Brand’s “clear message”, and how he had “done his bit to stave off disaster and defend the struggles for justice that now beckon.” Brand in turn had called Owen Jones “Our Generation’s Orwell”, a quote printed in generously sized font on the cover of Jones’s book - the now rather ironically entitled The Establishment – and how they get away with it.  In the light of the 2023 revelations about Brand, a photo was doing the rounds on Twitter of Jones and Brand with their arms draped around each other lovingly, comrades in the struggle.

In the UK, Jones had said in 2018, “people of very limited ability, because of who they know, can make it to powerful positions.” He was clearly right.