After eight days of damaging revelations about the odious hard-right polemicist Toby Young, he has resigned from the Tory government's new universities watchdog.
Young had tried to hide his disgusting past by deleting some 50,000 Tweets, but people had already taken screenshots of some of the worst comments including anal rape 'jokes', casual misogyny and homophobia, a description of masturbating over images of starving children, and crude comments about the breasts of an underage girl.
Aside from the shower of gross Twitter comments there was Young's journalistic output, which included an article admitting the supply of cocaine, an article describing his efforts to trick lesbian women into having sexual contact with him, and most concerning of all, articles in which he tried to rehabilitate the concept of eugenics.
Had this been a Labour Party figure (like Jared O'Mara for example), we all know what the reaction would have been from the likes of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and the hard-right Guido Fawkes blog. But instead of a tidal wave of faux outrage we witnessed a week-long exercise in ridiculous Tory excuse-making.
Theresa May said that she was "not impressed" by Toby Young's comments, but refused to sack him; Boris Johnson described Young as having a "caustic wit" as if describing wanking over dying children is the work of a modern day Oscar Wilde; Toby Young even thanked the Guido Fawkes blog for their support in his ludicrous Facebook self-exoneration; and the universities minister Jo Johnson (the brother of Boris) even found himself defending anal rape jokes and modern eugenics in parliament after opposition MPs secured an emergency debate over Toby Young's appointment.
After a the furore showed no signs of dying down after a week the Tories even circulated a memo urging Tory MPs to deflect attention away from Toby Young by attacking and smearing Labour politicians. This wasn't just members of the Tory boys club sticking up for their horrible mate, it was an orchestrated effort by the Tory party machine to defend the indefensible.
Despite the desperate rearguard action from the Tory party machine, the pressure eventually told and Toby Young gave in and announced his resignation. It's astounding that despite all the repulsive comments and articles, he was allowed to walk away of his own volition, not fired.
The fact that the Tories stuck with such a repulsive and desperately unsuitable appointment to a supposedly neutral and impartial public sector role tells you all you need to know about how nasty they are, but there's another angle too.
The way they spent eight days robustly defending the indefensible and sustaining damage to their reputation just to let the guy resign illustrates their sheer incompetence.
Any competent organisation would have nipped the scandal in the bud by admitting the comments and pro-eugenics articles were unacceptable, and cancelling the appointment. But that's just not the way the Tory party works, especially under the weak and directionless leadership of Theresa May.
Toby Young is part of the Tory boys club and untouchable. Even if Theresa May had the inclination to sack him, she couldn't because she's in such a weak position and Toby's fellow members of the Tory boys club like Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jo Johnson would have kicked up a stink that would have threatened her position as party leader, so as usual she put self-interest above all and let the obnoxious creep keep his position.
Even after Young's resignation, Tories like Jo Johnson are still intent on making the situation worse by continuing to spew one-sided Toby Young eulogies and smearing everyone who objected to his appointment as "armchair critics".
It's as if they genuinely can't see what's wrong with appointing such a savagely biased and repulsive character to a supposedly impartial public position, and they're going to take their fury out on any members of the general public with the rudimentary judgement skills necessary to see why such a person is so catastrophically unfit for public office.
In their warped minds masturbating over starving children, anal rape 'jokes', casual misogyny and homophobia, obsessing over the breasts of a minor, and efforts to rehabilitate eugenics are absolutely fine, and Toby Young is some kind of unfortunate martyr, and that's the ridiculous narrative these out-of-touch Tory boys club buffoons are actually running with!
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