The Joke: Part Four

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“Sack Toby Young from University Watchdog Post

TOBY YOUNG - Theresa May’s new university regulator – thinks state school undergraduates are “stains”, wheelchair ramps in schools are an example of “ghastly, politically correct inclusiveness” and children with learning difficulties are “illiterate troglodytes.”

SACK HIM NOW!”

(Change.org petition. Final tally: 210,000 signatures)

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On 8 January, questions were asked in an Urgent Question session in Parliament about Young’s appointment to the Office for Students. The session – which can be watched on YouTube – is several times unintentionally funny, though presumably not for its subject.

It starts with then Education Secretary Jo Johnson making his defence of Young’s appointment to the role. The Office for Students board could not, he said, be made up only of university insiders, who would offer “little scrutiny and challenge to the section.” One of the Office’s central tenets was “promoting choice for consumers and encouraging real competition.”

Young had experience of all these things, Johnson said. Also, Young had apologised and regretted his comments, and made an assurance they would not be repeated. He would, Johnson added, “do much more to support the disadvantaged than so many of his armchair critics.”

Dawn Butler MP, Shadow Minister for Women and Equalities, author of an open letter to Theresa May that three days before had attacked Young’s appointment (written together with Angela Rayner MP) now stood up. She would lead the prosecution.

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Dawn Petula Butler, MP for Brent Central, was born in Forest Gate to Jamaican parents in 1969, and has served in Parliament since 2005. At the General, Municipal, Boilermakers” and Allied Trade Union (the GMB) she was officer on national race and equality issues. She also worked as adviser to Ken Livingstone on employment and social issues, at the office of the Mayor of London.

In the last decade controversy had followed Butler about. In 2009, it was alleged she had used tax-payers’ money to pay for a jacuzzi-style bath in her North London home, while claiming her main residence was in East London, less than 15 miles away. But amidst the MPs’ expenses scandal of that year, such lavishness was a mere drop in the steaming, bubbling spa of Parliamentary scandal.

Since then, Butler had shown herself adept at creating whirlwinds if not whirlpools of her own. In 2018, she managed to raise a squall around Jamie Oliver, accusing the chef publicly of “culturally appropriating” his “punchy jerk rice” [“Your jerk Rice is not okay,” she tweeted. “This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.”] In February 2020 she waded into the transgender debate, claiming – to widespread mockery – that a “child is born without sex.” In June the same year she was in the news again when, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis PD, she accused the British police too of having their “knee” on “the neck of the black, African, Caribbean, Asian minority ethnic communities.”

Butler clearly has her supporters – she has been in Parliament, on and off, since 2005, with a majority of 19,000. Whether she is a fearless fighter for justice or simply, as some would have it, a race-baiter of weapons-grade quality is a matter of opinion. What’s clear though is that she does not shy away from publicity, nor from picking fights with well-chosen opponents.

She was to get both now. This in many ways was to be Butler’s show.

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Butler declared herself “flabbergasted” by Youngs’ appointment, speaking of his “long history of misogynistic and homophobia” [sic] and adding that going to a “gay club dressed as a woman to molest lesbians is far from appropriate.”

This referred to an article Young had written more than twenty years before, in which he had put on make-up and tried to pick up gay women at a dive in New York. He referred to it light-heartedly in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People as “the most dangerous journalistic assignment of the nineties.” How true those words would turn out to be, he couldn’t have guessed.

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In fact, it was clear How to Lose Friends was a book Butler could have benefitted from reading. It would at least have prevented her next error.

“Just thirteen months ago, thirteen months ago,” she insisted, looking personally hurt, “someone put a sexual harassment document on his desk and he writes, Toby Young writes himself,…[she read her notes]

“The next bit was underlined in red felt tip pen: ‘A joke considered amusing by one may be offensive to another.’ I found out just how true these words were when I hired a strippergram to surprise a male colleague on what turned out to be Bring Our Daughters to Work Day.”

Butler shook her head in weary disgust. Just thirteen months ago.

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Actually, this was a straight untruth. The event had taken place more like 25 years before, in the early nineties, as any reader of Chapter Ten in Young’s book will confirm. It was a scene reproduced in the film adaptation of 2004: laddish, nineties behaviour in a different time, when Young was both single and childless.

It was an inaccuracy Butler would repeat in a television interview and then Question Time a few days later, though by then the thirteen months had become twelve.

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Back in Parliament, Butler went on to mention a joke Young had made on Twitter during Comic Relief  in 2009. In response to a Cardiff mother’s tweet about her reaction to a documentary on starving African children:

“God I’ve gone through about 5 boxes of Kleenex so far – Jesus…..”

Young had tweeted back:

“Me Too, I havn’t [sic] w***** so much in ages.”

This joke was a major exhibit for the prosecution, proof for them that Young had masturbated – or least joked about masturbating – over dying children.

But what was the actual target of this joke? We will return to it later.

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Now everyone piled in on Young. The SNP’s Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun), glowering above a yellow tartan tie, fulminated against Young’s “prejudice against the working class, several misogynistic tweets, masturbating.”  

Yvette Cooper (Labour) spoke of Young “tweeting repeatedly about women, about their knockers, their breasts, their baps.”

Philip Holobone (Conservative) declared with Stasi-like omniscience, “My constituency in Kettering have no time for unpleasant and obscene remarks, no matter who makes them.”

In fact, very few people came well out of this session. Jo Johnson did, with his plea that MPs respect Young’s “developmental journey” over the years and that they should all “encourage the best side of his personality.”

Another, Simon Clark MP (Conservative) was also generous, claiming that he’d been to Young’s school and found it “blind to colour, blind to background, blind to your wealth…” Young’s “deeds need to be respected,” Clark said. “They give him a credible platform to take that office.”

But such voices were rare.