As the rest of us were celebrating the New Year, the Tories decided to quietly sneak out an announcement that they'd appointed the vile hard-right polemicist Toby Young to their new (and supposedly impartial) universities watchdog.
Within a matter of hours it became clear that the Tories had failed to do even the slightest due diligence on the guy they were handing a job to. Not only did Toby Young have a disgusting back catalogue of misogynistic, homophobic, and downright disgusting Tweets, he'd also been attending secretive pro-eugenics conferences full of white supremacists and paedophilia apologists, and writing articles attempting to rehabilitate the concept of eugenics.
Eventually, after a nine day shit-storm over his repulsive comments and views, Toby Young resigned, and any sensible and/or vaguely competent political party would have looked into how they managed to appoint someone with such an appalling track record, but not the Tories.
On the very same day that Toby Young resigned over his back catalogue of despicable articles and Tweets, Theresa May appointed the recently elected Tory MP Ben Bradley as Vice Chair for Youth.
Apparently his job would be to get more young people to engage with the Conservative party.
Had they bothered to check Bradley's Internet history before appointing him, they would have come across a truly disgusting blog post calling for the sterilisation of unemployed people, as if unemployment is some kind of genetic disease, rather than a necessary condition in capitalist economies.
I mean just think about it, how else are the exploitative capitalist class going to extract as much profit from the labour force as possible if there isn't a permanent pool of unemployed workers ready to replace any worker who agitates too loudly for pay raises or better working conditions?
One of the most shocking things about his elitist views on unemployment is that Bradley is the first ever Tory MP in the former mining town of Mansfield.
If anyone should know that unemployment can be thrust upon people, families, and even entire communities through no fault of their own, then surely it's people in a former mining town that was socially and economically decimated by the closure of the mines (as well as the textiles industry and the Mansfield brewery)?
But no, they've actually gone and elected this elitist Tory prig as their MP.
How someone with such vile elitist views about the sterilisation of the poor ever made it through the selection process to become a Tory parliamentary candidate is bizarre enough, but his appointment to Theresa May's government as a kind of youth engagement officer, well it just defies belief doesn't it?
Bradley and his right-wing backers have attempted to defend his comments by making out they happened ages ago, but 2012 wasn't that long ago, and his comments were made in defence of Iain Duncan Smith's welfare cuts, as if sterilisation of the unemployed is somehow a natural extension of Tory party welfare policy.
We all know that if Labour (or any other political party) had appointed someone with such vile views to an official position, the Tories, the right-wing dominated print media, and the Guido Fawkes smear-mongering operation would be in all out attack mode over it. But because this guy is a Tory, they're churning out excuses, and pretending that the Tory mask hasn't slipped.
Theresa May has decided that someone who has so recently expressed such vile elitist views is an appropriate person to try to engage young people with right-wing politics.
But the truth is obvious for everyone to see. Not only did the Tory party welcome Bradley with open arms and promote him to an official position within the party, and either they did no due diligence on his background at any state, or they did do due diligence and concluded that sterilise the poor blog posts are well aligned with the Tory party ethos.
The Tory mask has well and truly slipped, and Theresa May's decision to let Bradley keep his job could well backfire. Perhaps he has more extreme pro-eugenics views lurking around in his past, and even if not, any youth Bradley tries to get hooked on right-wing politics can be easily warded off with warnings "don't listen to him, he's the sterilise the poor guy".
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