In a brutal flourish of history’s whip, the son of the man who coined the term “meritocracy” has been given a job for which he is not remotely qualified. In 1958, Michael Young published the satirical novel The Rise of the Meritocracy, set in a world where a system of personal merit has replaced the old-fashioned ruling gentry, only to harden into its own arbitrary social class. Now, to general outrage and dismay, his son Toby Young has been made a member of the British government’s new regulating body for universities, the Office for Students (OfS).

The OfS will be responsible for “driving value for money” in universities, Jo Johnson, the minister for universities and science, told The Guardian. It will also enforce “free speech” rules, which will prevent students from “no-platforming” offensive speakers or from assembling lists of trigger words. These new regulations make the OfS’s ideological drift very clear indeed. But Young’s appointment—alongside a former executive at HSBC—empties the OfS of all credibility. The only contact Young has ever had with education work is in cheerleading for Conservative anti-P.C. policies on education. His appointment epitomizes the bilious mixture of Tory snobbery and vulgar populism that gave us Brexit.

Young is a British journalist best known for judging Top Chef, his novel How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, and his op-eds in The Spectator, where he is a contributing editor. He has no experience of working in higher education whatsoever, besides a couple of fleeting gigs teaching during a failed Ph.D. attempt.



Young does have a record, however, of publicly supporting the Conservative Party, helping lead its supposed defense of free speech from the pitchfork-wielding members of the left. He has a record of blaming black Britons for not getting into Oxford, saying “the reason there are so few black British undergraduates at Oxford is because so few apply.” (As it happens, he didn’t get into Oxford on his own: His father called up the university and got him in.) He has a record of tweeting about British politicians’ cleavage. He has a record of calling inclusivity “ghastly,” and blaming New Labour for it:

Schools have got to be “inclusive” these days. That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library (though no Mark Twain), and a Special Educational Needs Department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Münchausen syndrome by proxy. If [former Education Secretary Michael] Gove is serious about wanting to bring back O-levels, the government will have to repeal the Equalities Act because any exam that isn’t “accessible” to a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six will be judged to be “elitist” and therefore forbidden by Harman’s Law.

Those absurd and cruel words were published in 2012 by the Spectator. But he has been talking down to students, disabled and otherwise, for a long time.