The grindingly algorithmic controversialist Toby Young was always painfully and obviously in the oedipal shadow of his socialist intellectual father, Michael Young. Each of his desperately politically incorrect tweets was an attempt to cuckold and castrate his progenitor.
Toby Young has wasted his life spitting cold mucus at a ghost and throwing clumps of his own hot excrement at a shade, a raging zoo monkey. Toby Young was at war with a phantom cloud of semen, long since turned to dust motes, bobbing on the west London thermals. But, because I am kind and good, I take no pleasure in the slow-motion farce of his downfall.
On Wednesday night, the probable reason for the sudden twin resignations of the self-styled “right-of-centre maverick” from both the spurious universities regulator and the Fulbright Commission became clear. Despite having survived last week’s cataloguing of his hastily concealed career of context-free non-character-driven monetisable offence, on Monday evening Toby Young finally ran out of options and fell on his own cucumber spiraliser.
Even though he was defended by his chum, Boris “Picaninny” Johnson, as being a “caustic wit”, the maverick self-styled “Toadmeister” had to go. Because, while national media slept, or commissioned supportive thinkpieces from his wealthy and powerful celebrity friends, the London Student newspaper was about to reveal that the Maverick Toadmeister had attended a secret conference on “intelligence”, featuring notorious speakers including in previous years white supremacists and a weird far-right paedophilia apologist called Emil.
Of course, attending a secret conference alongside white supremacists does not amount to endorsing their ideals. I once attended a performance of We Will Rock You, the Queen musical by Ben Elton and Queen, and, if anything, it made me despise the dreadful group even more than I did before, from a position of greater understanding. The Maverick Toadmeister, by his own admission, only attended the secret event for a few hours, only sat at the back, didn’t inhale any of the nazism that was being handed round, and nor did he supply any to anyone else.
But on Monday night, the Maverick Toadmeister realised that even declarations of love from his greatest champions, the environmental opportunist Michael Gove, the Daily Mail hate-funnel Sarah Vine, and the napkin’n’knick-knack guru Kirstie Allsopp, would not overwhelm the taint of his incidental association with genuine white supremacists.
For God’s sake, that’s what paranoid community activists in 70s blaxploitation movies thought white folk were doing – having secret meetings about how to stop them breeding – and it turns out we are! In fact, that’s the plot of the martial arts and black power musical Three the Hard Way (Gordon Parks Jr, 1974), but now with Toby Young as a curious bystander watching the evil Dr Fortrero plot to wipe out the black population, and claiming it’s research for a forthcoming speech.
If Boris Watermelon Smile Johnson’s brother, Boris Johnson Junior, intended the appointment of the Maverick Toadmeister to the universities regulator to counteract the influence of the Political Correctness Gone Mad Brigade, it’s fair to say he may have overplayed his hand somewhat.
The Maverick Toadmeister’s fellow secret conference attendee Richard Lynn, for example, advocates that predominantly white American states secede from the Union, making them dangerously likely to sink into the sea under the excess weight of the massive arses, and brains, of their remaining inhabitants.
The question presupposed by the title of the Maverick Toadmeister’s bestselling book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People had been fairly comprehensively answered.
Asked last week to comment on his attendance at a second intelligence jamboree, this time in Canada, a clearly discombobulated Maverick Toadmeister said he had been giving the “Amanda Holden Memorial Lecture”. Amanda Holden? Les Dennis’s ex-wife? Was the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home’s celebrity ambassador now a eugenicist? And also dead? Thank God Dustin Gee didn’t live to see the memory of The Laughter Show tarnished so.
I knew that there had been a famous science writer called Constance Holden. Had the Maverick Toadmeister, as no one is calling him ever, suffered a slip of his toad tongue? There wasn’t time to check the facts, sadly, as the witch hunt countdown clock was ticking. Needless to say, I immediately mobilised my massive bullying Twitter following of furious politically correct snowflake hypocrites to have Amanda Holden, eugenics apologist, erased from history.
By Wednesday public pressure had seen Holden lose her role as the face of Alpen, the colonic cleansing breakfast dust. And on Thursday Holden was digitally erased from every episode of Britain’s Got Talent and replaced by a surgically enhanced Christopher Plummer, verdicts on ventriloquists dripping like honey from glossed lips down a low-cut satin dress shimmering seductively in the light.
Then I realised the Maverick Toadmeister had made a mis-speak. He had meant Constance Holden. Amanda Holden was not a Nazi (nor, it turned out, was Constance Holden), and she was not dead. A newly confident and self-assured Christopher Plummer reluctantly submitted herself to the painful reverse-Holden procedure as long as she was allowed to keep the dress. (Luckily, Plummer’s most crucial organ had not yet been incinerated and was found still salvageable in an ashtray at a Soho cigar bar frequented by his surgeon.)
I don’t know the Maverick Toadmeister and I have never met him, though he did once make a winsome face at me across a corridor at Heston services, Britain’s worst services, on the M4. I recognised him from somewhere, but something about his curious smirk and his strange gait made me assume he was a lesbian, dressed as a homosexual, who had assumed I was a lesbian dressed as a heterosexual man and was trying to pick me up. What a tangled web we weave.
But where now for the Maverick Toadmeister? Can even vile jam-rags like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail employ him now? Who calls themselves, as an adult, the “Toadmeister” anyway? And “maverick” is what the commissioner shouts at Dirty Harry. It’s not what Dirty Harry tells the commissioner he is himself. That would be very uncool. Who does these strange and desperate things? Someone in search of an identity that has eluded them.
Sometime around 20 years ago Toby Young started being nasty about people less fortunate and privileged than him, and, like a shit Clarkson, he found it was easy to do and paid good money; and then the wind changed, and Toby Young was stuck with the horrible face he had made. And now people all over the internet will be drawing foreskins on his bald head. For ever. And Captain Von Trapp will never urinate standing up again.
BBC iPlayer edition of discussion of Stewart Lee on A Good Read
BBC iPlayer edition of discussion of Stewart Lee on A Good Read
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