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Toby Young: what were the tweets and comments that led to his resignation?
Pioneer of free schools criticised for series of crude and insensitive comments about disabled people and women
Toby Young has quit the Office for Students after days of pressure over offensive comments he made on social media, including crude remarks about women's breasts and disabled people.
Writing in The Spectator Young said his “appointment has become a distraction from its vital work of broadening access to higher education and defending academic freedom.”
Young's history of offensive tweets and comments led to a debate in parliament on Monday, where ministers were put under intense pressure from both Conservative and opposition MPs to withdraw their support from Young.
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Former Tory women's minister Maria Miller told MPs that Young's appointment was “clearly at odds with the equality principles that this government is clearly supportive of.”
Conservative MP Sarah Woolaston said Young's comments had “crossed a line”.
However, Universities Minister Jo Johnson defended the appointment, saying that while Young had expressed some “repellent” views, he had since embarked on a "developmental journey.”
Young has in the past claimed that working-class students at Oxford University were “universally unattractive” and “small, vaguely deformed undergraduates.” He also described wheelchair ramps being installed in British schools as a symptom of “ghastly inclusivity”
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Business Insider reports that Young once described a gay celebrity as looking “queer as a coot” and recalled visiting a bar containing “hardcore dykes.”
He also made a series of apparently sexist remarks about women. In one tweet Young, asked the name of an MP with “serious cleavage” shown during prime minister’s questions in 2012. Young tweeted other comments on women’s breasts, “including one directed at a woman he believed to be the wife of Danny Boyle, the film director,” says The Times.
After his appointment to the role Young deleted numerous tweets in an effort to clear his name.
Young insisted in the Spectator piece that the description of him since his appointment was announced in December had been a “caricature” that would be unrecognisable to anyone who knew him. However, he admitted that many of the things he had written before becoming involved in education were “either ill-judged or just plain wrong” and apologised for them.
