Those who look in regularly on Zelo Street will recall the joyous moment at the start of the year when the loathsome Toby Young resigned his board membership of the new Office for Students, following widespread condemnation of the appointment. Tobes later also resigned as Director of the New Schools Network, thus precipitating another outpouring of joy and celebration. And that might have been that.
Except that Tobes has decided to exhume the whole affair, as an orchestra of nanoviolins plays in the background and he gets out a king-sized onion, the whole tiresome business played out in an article for Quillette, a publication described as “seeking to make ‘tired alt-right talking points sound erudite’”, titled “The public humiliation diet”.
Tobes asks, apropos the backlash at his being handed another publicly-funded post, “How did that happen? Well, it didn’t help that I’m pro-Brexit and was a prominent campaigner for the Leave side in the referendum about Britain’s membership in the European Union. Many distinguished academics thought that alone was enough to disqualify me from regulating Britain’s universities. The British professoriat is passionately pro-EU and believes anyone who doesn’t share their view is a racist bigot”.
Bullshit, Tobes. The British professoriat is far more tolerant and forgiving than you and your fellow right-leaning boo-boys. But that is a mere hors d’oeuvres for a much more pungent entrée: “I had been tarred with all the vices of a privileged white male - tarred and feathered … The first wave of attacks took the form of dredging up articles I’d written in the past and mining them for evidence that I held unpalatable views”.
Just like Tobes’ pals in the right-wing press, and their hangers-on, would have done to anyone on the left. Where was Tobes when his pals at the Guido Fawkes blog were trawling Twitter feeds for dirt? Where, indeed, was Tobes, who has featured many times in the Mail titles, when the Mail on Sunday trashed the aspirations of the unfortunate teenager Paris Brown all over its front page - over a string of Tweets? Nowhere.
But Tobes does tell us how wonderful Fraser Nelson and all at the Spectator have been. That’s the Spectator which still features anti-Semite Taki Theodoracopulos, Islamophobe Doug Murray The K, and misogynist bigot Rod Liddle.
Tobes whines about being misquoted over various eugenics claims. But this quote from the London Student nails his whining: “A eugenics conference held annually at University College London by an honorary professor, the London Conference on Intelligence, is dominated by a secretive group of white supremacists with neo-Nazi links”. He went there, whether or not he sat at the back and kept quiet.
Yet he is still prepared to blithely ask “Why were some people prepared to cast judgment based on such meager evidence? Why did certain words I’d used in the past count for so much more than my actions?” Because the evidence wasn’t meagre, he’d spent years living by the sword and making a total and utter twat of himself, and so when the fall came, there was precious little sympathy out there. That’s why.
Toby Young is known as Captain Bellend for one reason. Because he’s a bellend.
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