Toby Young Press Hypocrisy

The protesting by the loathsome Toby Young at his terribly rotten treatment by the media, which followed the interview he gave to Laura McInerney and which was featured in Schools Week, has not yet died down. Tobes is still sore at the behaviour of his fellow journalists. So it all happened last Friday and the news cycle has moved on? That won’t placate Tobes, and in any case, he can still extract clickbait from it.

Another failed attempt to instigate grown-up debate by Tobes

So yesterday we got “I got caught up in a media sh*t storm on Friday – and it was horrible”, followed by “Read this account of how I became the victim of a media cock-up on Friday”. And when Rachel Johnson, sister of Bozza, Tweeted “RTing this record-straightener on his free schools from @toadmeister. I feel for poor Tobes!” the only thing to do was to advertise this too. It was all so unfair!

However, and here we encounter a significantly sized however, misrepresenting others and using the platform provided by the press to do so has never bothered Tobes when the boot was on the other foot, as one Zelo Street regular observed recently. When a maths teacher called Jonny Griffiths posted his thoughts on students who become over-absorbed by their quest for top “A” Level grades in the TES back in 2012, the response was swift.

What irked Tobes was Griffiths’ comment to a student who was taking his quest for a “A” grade so seriously it concerned his teacher. He said to the student “what is better: to go to Cambridge with three As and hate it or to go to Bangor with three Cs and love it?” He also said “The world is your oyster. University maths departments will be fighting over you. After that, employers will be”. He clearly wanted the student to have a good future.

That did not deter Tobes, who swiftly penned “Dumbing down of state education has made Britain more unequal than 25 years ago … In the name of equality, anti-elitist teachers are betraying the hopes of the young”, going on to rant “Was Jonny Griffiths a real teacher or the fictional creation of a brilliant Tory satirist? Most people found it hard to believe that a teacher who didn’t want his pupils to do well could be in gainful employment”.

See what Toby Young did? He cut the parts of Griffiths’ TES article that gave the full context, so he could flagrantly misrepresent him in order to push his own prejudices. Or, to put in another way, the same thing he is now complaining so bitterly about. It gets worse: Tobes did not even contact Griffiths before trashing his reputation. We know this as Jonny Griffiths has assembled his correspondence for all to see.

Not only did he write a hatchet job, he willingly advertised it on Twitter (that Tweet is still live)

From this we can see that there was no attempt to get any student to settle for less, and certainly not to want those students to do less well in the world of employment. This of course cut no ice with Toby Young, whose article is still live at the Telegraph website. That crass smear on Griffiths concludes “For too long, English teachers at comprehensives have been telling their pupils not to bother with the best that’s been thought and written, but to watch 'Britain’s Got Talent' and read 'Heat' magazine instead”.

And this is the meathead who is whinging about being misrepresented by the press. Toby Young is considered loathsome for a good reason - because he is just that.

[Jonny Griffiths is so uncaring, he maintains a website to help both teachers and students with their “A” Level Pure Mathematics. Tobes managed to miss that one too]