Toby Young Doesn’t Remember The 70s

Facts are not easy currency for the loathsome Toby Young: two years ago, when he made his defence of what he called “press freedom”, which was in reality a grovelling and shameless endorsement of the sham regulation that produced all the problems in the first place, he had great difficulty sticking to those pesky facts. So it is when he scribbles another of those not really funny pieces about the Labour leadership contest.

Behold an allegedly serious commentator

And, as anyone unfortunate enough to have been tuned in to the latest edition of Any Questions will have discovered, Tobes has in any case changed his mind on his preferred candidate. Not so long ago, he was pretending to be one of those “Tories For Corbyn”, urging others to register as Labour supporters and vote for the veteran left-winger, until he was rumbled and the party declined to refund his dosh.

Now he is backing Yvette Cooper, which is probably akin to the kiss of death. Tobes has also been (momentarily) allowed back into the Sun, to tell the world what a Corbyn party political broadcast would be like. He clearly thinks his effort is side-splittingly funny, but all he shows is that he can’t be arsed checking his facts first. “We see a red Morris Marina pull up in front of an abandoned steel mill” begins his commentary.

That would be the steel mills that were abandoned, not by Labour, but under the less than benign premiership of his heroine Margaret Thatcher - starting with Consett in 1980, followed in the next decade by Corby, Ebbw Vale, Shotton, and Ravenscraig. Tobes also manages not to tell his readers that unemployment may have been well north of a million when Mrs T came to power, but she managed to more than double that number.

How about one of Tobes’ incredibly unfunny asides to lighten the mood? Well, he does try: his Corbyn PPB has its subject telling “We used to manufacture some pretty good products in this country. [We hear a loud bang as smoke billows from the car’s engine]”. Laugh? I thought I’d never start. The Morris Marina may have had all manner of faults, but its engine was not, repeat not, repeat NOT, one of them.

Had Tobes bothered to do his homework - yes, I know, that’s asking too much of him - he would have found out that the Marina was powered by the venerable (and highly reliable) A and B series engines, which had powered BMC group cars since the 1950s. Had Tobes wanted to evoke a British Leyland product with an iffy power unit, he should have cited the Triumph Stag - which really did have engine problems. A lot of them.

One has to hope that all those pupils at Tobes’ allegedly very wonderful West London Free School benefit from teaching of recent history that is rather more grounded in facts than the school’s founder, who would rather make it up as he goes along, not telling his audience that he had not become part of the workforce when Mrs T first came to power, but he had heard lots of rumours about how terrible it was back then.

Not half as terrible as Tobes’ crappy columns, though. No change there, then.