The snowflakes of the right are not happy about Toby Young's resignation

Toby Young’s trolling was designed to provoke a reaction. Now it has provoked a reaction in people like Jo Johnson and many others besides him, who are whinging, bellyaching and crying about it

Toby Young has stepped down (PA)

Last week I suggested Toby Young’s hiring as a non executive director of the Office for Students might actually be good news for the left in the way it cast a unflattering light on the lack of diversity in public life, the regressive thinking of the right wing establishment that runs this country, and the ugly statements it somehow views as acceptable.

The reaction to his resignation – inevitable given the tenor of his past barbs at women, gay people, working class kids and disabled people such as myself – only adds to that.

The furore is hilarious when you consider the fact that even Toby Young has stopped defending Toby Young, with his resignation statement displaying a certain amount of dignity, something that was utterly absent from the Twitter feed that caused all his problems until he started deleting large parts of it.

Let’s start with a couple of examples.

Spiked got the ball rolling by furiously berating “the middle class Twittermob”.

It’s a strange thing for a magazine that says it champions free speech to then go and attack people for exercising theirs to criticise someone who has said some pretty ugly things about large parts of the British population.

By the way, real mobs indulge in actual violence. Breaking things, burning things. The “Twittermob” just sometimes threatens it, sometimes after having been incited to do so. I’ve been on the receiving end as have some of my colleagues, as have some MPs. But while I’ve seen a lot anger in respect of Mr Young, I haven’t yet seen that, although I stand ready to be corrected.

How about this from Julia Hartley-Brewer, the right wing radio presenter. “If you think Toby Young is unfit to be on the university regulator board because he tweeted about women’s tits but you voted for Jeremy Corbyn to be PM after he took cash from Russia & Iran, and supported Hamas & the IRA, then you’re an idiot,” she tweeted.

Were you thinking what I was thinking when I saw that? Namely what the hell has Jeremy Corbyn (who, by the way, can be voted out if you don’t like him) got to do with any of this?

It’s like someone trying to defend a foul happy Crystal Palace by pointing to the hits indulged in by the defence of the NFL’s New Orleans Saints (P.S. Before I get lynched by fans of either, this is not intended as a slur on them).

Moving swiftly on there was this: “His decision to stand down from the OfS board and repeat unreserved apologies for inappropriate past remarks reflects his character better than the one-sided caricature from his armchair critics.” That was tweeted by Young’s Government BFF Jo Johnson before he was unceremoniously booted off the universities beat in the latest reshuffle.

Sorry, but again, how is it one sided to take issue with someone who has actively sought to draw attention to themselves by lobbing bricks at others, mostly people less advantaged than himself, assuming an important public role? Perhaps it’s down to my having gone to a bog standard comp, but that one is beyond me. Maybe I just didn’t get enough brain food in my free school meals.

Young’s trolling was designed to provoke a reaction. Now it has provoked a reaction in people like Jo Johnson, and many others besides him, are whinging, bellyaching and crying about it. They are, in point of fact, indulging in the sort of behaviour they bemoan when they perceive it coming from the left, and especially from millennials. The word “snowflake” does rather spring to mind at this point.

A Conservative with a far more interesting perspective on the affair is Robert Halfon, who like me has a walking disability and was thus the target of some of Young’s ire.

Mr Halfon wrote a piece for the Sunday Times that basically came to the same conclusion that I did, albeit from a very different starting point

He correctly argued that the criticism of Toby Young has nothing to do with political correctness, or free speech, opining that while the latter can say what he likes being a “shock jock” is clearly not the same thing as a being university regulator.

“By giving the appearance that there are no boundaries at all as to what is regarded as offensive, all the Conservatives are doing is allowing the left to fill the vacuum,” he argued, lamenting the way his party had allowed itself to fall into “an elephant trap of its own making”.

Although not all of those I have quoted would necessarily call themselves Conservatives, it really doesn’t matter all that much because, happily, their reaction to his firing has done the same thing. And they sometimes call Labour “the stupid party”.