Behold Lord Tobes Of Bellend

And so it came to pass that the time of year meant party leaders nominating a variety of the undeserving and otherwise underemployed as new members of the House of Lords, the Other Place that the current Government was so keen to abolish, but now, seemingly, isn’t. Labour has put forward thirty names, but most of them will escape scrutiny, thanks to Kemi Badenoch.

As ever, at times like this, the opposition rides to your rescue: Ms Badenoch, not content with making herself and her party look less credible with every week’s PMQs, has put forward one name guaranteed to put those of Charlotte Owen and Ross Kempsell, ennobled at the behest of disgraced former occasional PM Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, in the shade.

Because the latest name in the Tory prospective peerage frame is none other than the loathsome Toby Young, who has for many years been full value for his nickname of Captain Bellend. I first observed the deep and sincere affection his peers in the media held for Tobes some years ago.

At the launch event for the HuffPost UK, Zelo Street was there in the auditorium, sitting in the back row as the launch presentation and debate began. Some 20 minutes later, the entrance door to my left opened, someone walked through it, and a chorus of booing ensued. What, I asked the bloke to my left, was all that about? “It’s OK, it’s only Toby Young” came the reply.

It got worse: Tobes was apparently having difficulty finding a seat. The disruption was brought to a swift end when Arianna Huffington recognised The Great Man, and no doubt also knew about all the snarky abuse that he had dispensed in her general direction. “Would you like to join us?” she asked, at which point Tobes thought better of making an even bigger arsehole of himself, and found himself a seat with remarkable swiftness.

That is the memory coming to the fore every time our free and fearless press attempts to polish the turd that is Captain Bellend: the foot-soldiers of this industry have a rather lower opinion of his munificence than their bosses. So most of the crap being spoken about him in reaction to the peerage nomination can be taken with one gigantic piece of salt.

Pride of place in that department goes to the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph proclaiming “Free speech champion Toby Young awarded peerage”. As Billy Connolly once said, there’s going to be some swearing … FUCK OFF. Anyone and everyone has the right of free speech. But all too many on the right don’t like actions having consequences.

It gets worse, as a perusal of Tobes’ Wikipedia entry demonstrates: “Young has admitted using cocaine at the Groucho Club in central London, and also supplying drugs to others. He was subsequently expelled from membership of the club in late 2001 for writing about the cocaine use of friends he had supplied with the drug during a 1997 photo shoot for Vanity Fair”.

Any more minus points? “Young has come under criticism for comments he made on Twitter … These included what an Evening Standard editorial called ‘an obsession with commenting on the anatomy of women in the public eye’”. And how’s this for vanity? “Young is reported to have edited his own Wikipedia page 282 times over the course of six years”. Modest with it, eh?

Maybe this comment from Dawn Foster sums up Tobes’ true place in the establishment pantheon: “Young seems to think he is held in high regard by free school advocates. When I mentioned his name in the course of interviewing a former Department for Education employee for the piece, my interviewee headbutted the restaurant table in exasperation. I have found the sentiment, if not the gesture, to be common among his ideological comrades”.

That is merely reinforced by the knowledge that he was taken on, and then sacked, by the Times, under the editorship of Charles Wilson. This part of his career trajectory he shares with Bozo The Clown, someone else who is full of crap and gobby with it. He’s called Captain Bellend. Because he’s a bellend.

Lord Tobes of Bellend, of the borough of Leering in the county of Misogyny. Because they couldn’t find a horse called Incitatus.

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