Birds of a feather

6 January 2018, 21:01 | Updated: 6 January 2018, 21:05

boris

Toby Young is a right-wing controversialist that has been appointed to the board that regulates universities.

This has given people cause for concern because of his comments in the past about women and minorities.

Boris Johnson is our chief diplomat, his position is that all those dolly birds and pooftahs should get a grip and stop whining.

He did not say that, I made that up. But only just.

Boris said that Toby Young possessed just the sort of caustic wit that made him perfect for the job.

Examples of that wit were bulk-deleted by Toby Young from his Twitter account the moment people started to point them out.

They were mostly about the size of women's breasts and insults about the poor and gay people.

This is what passes for caustic wit in Boris Johnson's world because that is exactly what he writes too.

In 1996, while a journalist for the Telegraph, Johnson went to the Labour conference and wrote “the 'Tottymeter' reading is higher than at any Labour Party conference in living memory”.

He wrote, "Time and again the 'Tottymeter' has gone off as a young woman delegate mounts the rostrum."

Good word that: mounts.

I bet he got a tiny bulge of excitement when he came up with that one.

It was a time when he noted that women's allegiance was shifting to the Labour party.

His position was that this was not because of a more inclusive stance by Labour, but because Labour was improving in the polls and women's “natural fickleness” meant they were following the sweet smell of success.

They couldn't help themselves, you see.

When Johnson edited the Spectator magazine, despite complaints, he pinned a Pirelli calendar to the wall.

Apparently, Boris Johnson was 14 years old when he edited the Spectator.

When he left, he wrote to his successor that if Kimberly Quinn, who was then the Spectator's publisher, came by with some helpful suggestions for boosting circulation, he should "Just pat her on the bottom and send her on her way."

In 2005, while campaigning to become the Conservative MP for Henley in the general election, he told voters that "voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts,"

In 2012, while hosting the London Olympics as mayor, Johnson told his readers of the "magnificent" experience of watching "semi-naked women playing beach volleyball ... glistening like wet otters."

You could be forgiven feeling that people like him are a bit emotionally stunted – maybe it was the single-sex private school education.

He seems to be still in his uniform, pulling pigtails on the bus.

It is not just women, as you can imagine – the stunted juvenile mind would not stop there.

Writing in the Spectator in 2000, Johnson attacked what he called "Labour's appalling agenda, encouraging the teaching of homosexuality in schools, and all the rest of it.", compared gay marriage to bestiality and wrote of "tank-topped bumboys" blubbing that Peter Mandelson had left the government.

No wonder he thinks that his close personal friend Toby Young is ideal for the board of the university regulator, the body that is supposed to have students' welfare at its heart.

It is just the sort of snorting good wheeze that a modern day Just William would come up with.