Why we should secretly celebrate Toby Young’s appointment

The appointment of Tory troll Toby Young to the board of the Government’s new higher education regulator is something the liberals – who he has tried to bait for years – might want to quietly cheer. I know I did.

No, don’t choke on your coffee. Think about it for a minute and you’ll see how Young’s position as a non-executive director of the Office for Students, if the new body survives the furore whipped up by Young’s crude and sometimes downright nasty tweets, nails a number of lies propagated by the right in this country.

Let’s start with Theresa May’s promise to make Britain a “country that works for the many and not just the few”. I know, it stretched credibility when she said it, and all the more so after she backed away from the proposals she floated that might have gone some way to achieving that, such as putting workers on boards.

Young’s appointment to this board should, however, expose the fallacy of that pledge once and for all. There could hardly be better representation of how this country, and particularly its current Government, works only for the few.

Young is an embodiment of how privilege wins out. As the son of a Labour peer and a BBC producer and writer, it is true, as he is fond of reminding people, that he was state educated. But there’s state educated and state educated.

Young went to a Hampstead grammar school for his A levels, and got into Oxford University through the back door after falling short of the required grades (he managed B, B, C) thanks to his father putting in a call. He studied PPE, the top people’s degree, and did very well. That translated into a number of nice gigs at top publications. Connections, you see.

Contrast his treatment with that of Laura Spence, whose case created a big fuss a few years ago after it emerged that she had failed to receive an offer to read medicine at Young’s old uni despite getting multiple As at GCSE and following it up with four top-graded A levels. She studied for them at Monkseaton Community College in North Tyneside where she was the only Oxbridge applicant. The reason given for her rejection was her performance at interview. Had her papa been a peer of the realm, like Young’s, that might not have mattered.

Not only has Young’s appointment underlined how this is a country that still only works for the few, for people who have the right connections and move in the right circles, it also demonstrates another falsehood: the claim that the British establishment is made up of a mythical liberal elite. In fact it is full of people who not only look like Toby Young, and have similarly, or even more, privileged backgrounds, but who also think like Toby Young. They’re just quieter about it and they keep their obsessions, such as the one Young apparently has with women’s breasts, off their Twitter accounts.

If there were a genuine commitment among the members of the establishment to diversity, which Young has railed against, and the liberal values, which he despises, then the commitment would be reflected in the composition of Government bodies.

As it is, while they usually like to have a woman or two on board, maybe a person of colour and perhaps even a disabled person if they’re feeling really daring, those groups are nearly always kept in the minority.

Were you to be a fly on the wall when the lesser Toby Youngs that make up the majority on Government bodies and boards are drinking in their clubs, you’d probably find that their views aren’t all that far removed from his. Despite his claims, he really doesn’t add much in the way of “intellectual diversity”.

The fuss over his hiring has highlighted these issues in a way that the installation of a quieter lookalike wouldn’t have.

Young has been caught out by his attempt to portray himself as a “rebel” conservative, the guy brave enough to say what the man on the street is supposedly thinking, the antidote to the “PC brigade”.

That’s another myth slain. Toby Young, his former Spectator colleague turned defender Boris Johnson and their ilk aren’t rebels, or anything like it.

Yet whenever the liberal-baiting trolls decide that they’ve had enough of saying mean things about people less powerful and less privileged than themselves they’re quickly forgiven and elevated to the halls of the great and the good.

What’s that, you’re ready to come in from the cold? Want to do something in public life? Sure. Just offer a non-apology if someone’s taken a screen shot of something dodgy you tweeted before it was deleted, or highlighted something awful you’ve written, and the job’s yours.

So here’s to Jo Johnson, BoJo’s lil’ bro, and another paid-up member of the posh boys’ establishment club, for making the appointment. The anger whipped up by it, and the spotlight it throws on a rotten and corrupt system that benefits people like him, should serve to assist those of us who want to see the back of him and his wretched Government as soon as is humanly possible.