THE News Letter on Monday dug up a couple of people who are very unhappy about aspects of a new LGBTQIA+ services centre in Belfast city centre.
Well, one is a person, the other is a group which banged out a statement without putting a name on it, so that leaves us with one person who’s very unhappy about the new ‘hub’.
Toby Young – for it is he – is extremely exercised about City Hall insisting that anyone wishing to rent out space on the floor beneath the LGBTQIA+ offices must use it in a way that’s “complementary and compatible with” the LGBTQIA+ hub.
Toby – aka Baron Young of Acton in the Borough of Ealing – drew on his non-existent legal training to tell the News Letter: “If a Christian group applies to use the ground floor and is vetoed by the woke groups on the first floor, it would have a slam-dunk case for unlawful discrimination.”
It's at this point that we stop and ask ourselves what it was that led the News Letter to believe that Baron Young – or is it Lord Young? – is the go-to guy when it comes to the issue of rental law.
Well, Toby is the director of the Free Speech Union (FSU), a position he appointed himself to when he founded the right-wing ginger group six years ago. Tobes would later write that he founded the FSU to oppose cancel culture.
It doesn’t take a person to be particularly perceptive to wonder whether Toby’s decision to take up the sword of justice and go to war with cancel culture might mean that at some stage in his long career Toby himself might have been laid low by the HR wokesters. And the answer comes yes – yes, he has had his bright hopes dashed by dark forces. On many instances, actually, but let’s look at the one which gave birth to the FSU.
Toby has long had a passion for schools. Well, free schools, actually, which are state-funded schools run independently of local authorities and giving staff, governors and parents a greatly enhanced say in the curriculum, ethos and pay levels. Toby combined his love of independent schools (that are financially dependent on the state) with an interest in eugenics. He was particularly taken by the idea that “changing people’s genes” via “progressive eugenics” could increase society’s intelligence. The less said about progressive eugenics the better, so let it just be said that it advocates encouraging the successful and the educated to breed and discouraging the Jo Soaps from having children. What form the ‘encouragement’ takes is where history tells us the real trouble begins to emerge.
As the wingnut klaxon wails, let’s quickly swerve away from Toby’s, ah, interesting takes on education and evolution and concentrate instead on how cancel culture downed his rising star.
Thanks to – or some might say despite – his interest in classroom matters, Toby was in 2018 appointed by the Tories to the board of the newly-minted Office for Students (OfS), a quango which is effectively the university regulator.
But as Toby ordered wallpaper and furniture for his new office, questions were being asked about whether he was a good fit for a body which would of necessity require him to be taken seriously by people – and by women in particular. A tsunami of outrageous tweets of his emerged, ranging in nature from ‘Yikes!’, to ‘Wtf, bro!’. What they revealed was a middle-aged man with a 14-year-old’s fascination with women’s body parts – their breasts in particular.
“What happened to [Claudia] Winkleman’s breasts,” he tweeted while watching Comic Relief. “Put on some weight, girlie.”
Watching the Oscars, he tweeted: “Danny Boyle’s wife’s got huge knockers.”
Watching the Golden Globes, he tweeted: “Helen Mirren is looking good. #GrandmasI’dLiketoShag.”
“In a hotel room with five-months pregnant Padma [Lakshmi, with whom he appeared in an episode of a celebrity cooking show],” he revealed. “Her boobs are MASSIVE. Be careful what you wish for.”
Watching the Emmys, he tweeted: “The women here are smoking hot. There should be an award for Best Baps.”
Watching Prime Minister’s Questions, he tweeted: “Serious cleavage behind Ed Milliband’s head. Anyone know who it belongs to?”
This is just a taste of the publishable tweets that Sir Toby – or is it Earl Toby? – was wanging out night after night as he sprawled tongue-out in front of his TV – the worst of which can’t be reproduced here. But since a deeper appreciation of the man’s psyche is needed, here’s one near-the-knuckle taster, with apologies in advance. When an emotional woman tweeted that she must have gone through five boxes of Kleenex while watching a Comic Relief film on extreme child poverty in Kenya, Toby Young replied: “Me too. I havn’t (sic) w**ked so much in ages.”
SIMPLY THE BREAST: Toby Young
Now you may argue that a slavering obsession with women’s breasts and the hilariously varied words that men use to describe them does not disqualify controversial Londoner Toby from commenting on local authority rental issues in Belfast. You may even say that while cracking jokes about masturbating at the thought of hungry African children is edgy comedy it doesn’t impinge on Tobes’ right to vent on obscure regional LGBTQIA+ matters.
But perhaps some might consider Toby calling George Michael “queer as a coot” or referring to gay women as “hardcore dykes” might tend to compromise his new role as an arbiter of public authority.
Whatever the case, as the pressure grew for the Tories to sack Toby from his new universities post before he’d even pinned his Razzle Readers’ Wives poster to his office wall, the beleaguered future peer did the honourable thing. He deleted all his dirty tweets. Well, 50,000 of them anyway, because the internet being the internet there’s liable to be a few still floating about that Tobes missed. Then he said he was sorry for what he called “sophomoric”, “silly” and “ill-judged” tweets.
And it worked. PM Theresa May said he could stay in his new job, even though she was “not at all impressed” by his tweets and would not hesitate to fire him if he stayed up late tweeting about big diddies again.
To be absolutely accurate, it worked for 24 hours. Because once the petition calling on him to be fired went over 200,000, Tobes was handed his P45, his crispy sock and the pages he’d torn out from the ladies underwear section of the Littlewoods catalogue and sent on his way. Cancel culture had got him.
Eight days he lasted in the job. But did he let the disappointment crush him?
No.
He.
Did.
Not.
He stood up, brushed himself off, changed his trunks and formed the Free Speech Union so that other people fired for saying things they admit were “ill-judged” and for which they apologised have someone to turn to. And so that the News Letter has someone to ring when it comes to matters moral.
