To really, really hate Toby Young

[MargaretCavendish]

So, yes, I'm an academic and I think Toby Young was a crap choice for his new job (as does just about anybody who knows anything about it). But it has also just reminded me of the depth of my hatred for him - I think he is the person who I most hate in the world, which is unreasonable really, given he isn't actually a mass murderer or genocidal dictator. But... is it? IABU to think that Toby Young is the world's most odious twat?

Is he the one that comes on threads like this getting all whiney - or is that the other mahoosive twat Coren?

I don't know much about Toby Young other than he set up a free(?) school but the new job did make me think WTF.
Giles Coren gives me the creeps.

Could anyone update me on why Giles Coren is grouped with Toby Young? I must have missed this

Because they've got similar careers and both got where they are on family connections rather than merit.

And because they both delight in writing deliberately offensive things because they think they're funny, eg. Coren's recent piece where he called his 4 year old son fat and said he looked 'retarded'.

Any academic who had tweeted even one of those things would be under suspension and waiting to lose their job. Yet this man gets to regulate us all.

Has anyone mentioned his comments on inclusion in schools yet?

Ugh at Coren’s latest article. Sounds horrible. Who is his dad?

He's an appalling person.

His attitudes towards women, children with special needs, disabled people and anyone from a working class background are just unbelievable.

And that's not even starting on his attitude towards the teaching profession.

I have signed a petition against this new position. I cannot think of many people less suited to having any influence over young people or our education system.

He's a Cunty McCuntychops and his appointment takes the utter piss.

Don't know much about him, apart from that he writes for the Spectator. Just done some googling - here's a bit from an interview with Lynn Barber in the Guardian -

*'The most shameful story in the first book is about how he rang a Serbian waitress he'd once shagged and asked her to come round to his flat in the middle of the night - don't bother to dress, he told her, just jump in a cab and I'll pay the driver when you arrive. She did. He meanwhile fell asleep and did not respond to the doorbell. The cab driver dumped her, in her nightie, in the street, having first tried to rape her. Toby felt quite bad about it the next day. Didn't he hesitate to include that? 'It's sometimes a difficult decision whether to include things that cast me in a poor light, and I think the reason for doing so ultimately is that if you can skate very close to the edge and somehow keep the reader with you, they end up liking you more than if they'd liked you from the get-go.'

But his new book has an even worse story about how he insisted on taking his wife skiing when she was pregnant with their first child, and she had a bad fall on the piste that she was afraid might have damaged the baby. Reluctantly, he took her to the doctor who said he could not hear a foetal heartbeat and they should take an air ambulance to hospital immediately. But Toby baulked at paying £30,000 for an air ambulance and drove her there instead. Luckily, the baby was all right - but what a skinflint!

However, the most jaw-dropping moment in the whole ski-miscarriage saga comes when he is driving Caroline to hospital and wonders whether it will turn out to have been a phantom pregnancy and - this is the nub - whether Caroline will 'see the funny side'. I believe I have a more robust sense of humour than most people, but I cannot for the life of me imagine what is the funny side of phantom pregnancy. Could he explain? 'Well, there would have been something absurd about going to the medical centre because there was no heartbeat, thinking that you'd killed the baby, only to discover there was no baby anyway. It's the sort of thing that a couple might be able to laugh about, don't you think?' He asks as if he really wants to know the answer, so I assure him: 'No. Absolutely not. Never.' And he looks puzzled and interested, like a Martian making a mental note: 'Remember - phantom pregnancy not funny.'"*

I've really warmed to him

Some of you may be interested in the other Toby Young thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/3127079-Toby-Young

Christ that's awful Renfrew, he sounds like a sociopath.

Signing in for the 'Toby Young is Trolling the UK - And I Need It To Stop!' Support Group.

He's toxic.

He's proof that We Need To Do Something About White Male Privilege.

Too early to call as to whether this is another insult we have to endure from The Government of Clowns or whether this will be a nail in their coffin.

I really hope it's the latter.

And LOL to the first few respondents and their "He's quite inoffensive" responses. If I didn't think they were poli-trolls, I'd be wondering what the hell had happened to their moral compasses.

FYI: Toby Young sets out to be offensive. He does the verbal equivalent of pulling his trousers down an pooing in the condiments aisle in Sainsbury's. For attention. For money. To piss off his long-dead daddy. In an ideal world, you'd give people like that therapy. In a less ideal world, you give them a column in the Daily Heil. In a badly dysnfunctional government, you give them a role in overseeing universities.

You are supposed to be offended. That is what he is aiming for. To find him 'mildly inoffensive' ... well, something has gone badly awry with your navigation of the world of others.

The "How to lose friends..." book was the first time I encountered him and I read it with a feeling of repulsion. It's a long time ago so I've forgotten the detail but it read as if he had genuinely thought he was being entertaining but it wasn't.

Errrrr why? Man's a cunt.

And a Tory.

Imo Galloway is a cunt

And wants to get back into the Labour Party.

Being a cunt isn't the prefix of belonging to one party or another.

I think Kathy Burke pretty much nailed it where both TY and Boris are concerned.

That skiing story reveals him to be even more of a skinflint than appears at first sight. Because surely if you're going skiing with your pregnant wife you make sure you have insurance that covers both of you for the possibility of needing an air ambulance. The fact that he might have had to pay reveals that he was too tight (or too incompetent) to organise bog standard insurance.

He wrote an unintentionally hilarious article once about how he’d stopped believing in friendship when very few of his friends (best man included) showed up for his stag weekend.

Can’t think why they swerved a weekend away with old Tobes!

And let us not forget the lovely folk rushing to defend him.

The Rancid Clown Boris Johnson.

Another one whose utter ineptitude should have disbarred him from any responsible position but for whom a toxic culture of reactionary male privilege has worked to ease him to a position he is absolutely incompetent to hold.

I hope that the utter crassness of all this finally brings the whole disgraceful situation crashing down on the pair of them.

Can anyone actually explain what his job entails? I am reading so much (entirely justified) vitriol about the fuckwit that I can't seem to establish what his sinecurerole is.

Also, I am annoyed with Trump today whose witterings about Bannon once more means he occupies the UK media's spotlight, so TY doesn't even merit column inches insert rude, crass and inappropriate joke here

Wow, Renfrewshire. Those anecdotes are really something. I assume in his mind he thought they made him sound like a charmingly dry raconteur rather than the charmless twat he is.

He is an attention seeking knob and is probably loving all the attention he is getting.

Piggy This is a good article which outlines what his job is in actuality and effect, with a good lot of analysis: here

I think it's worth reading in full because it goes into the economic realities of academia these days, along with the whole 'free speech' thing. And it points out that the NUS has not been invited to be represented on this board.

Also there’s something semi –comical about the way he tries to paint himself as a kind of virile ladies’ man.

‘Phwoar, look at the tits on her’
‘I had me dick up her arse, mate’
‘I invited an Eastern European babe around to my flat for a good seeing to’.

Please, Toby. You ‘re fooling no one. You look like Phil Mitchell and you have all the seductive charm of Adrian Mole.