For everyone outraged by the rise and rise of Milo Yiannopoulos, it may be some consolation that the British journalist has yet, for all his efforts, to join the list of notables – Madonna, Boris, Adolf, Popeye – who are internationally recognised by their first names.

Most reports of Yiannopoulos’s new book deal with Simon & Schuster have been obliged to include some biographical background, on behalf of the completely baffled, if only to the effect that the Milo byline at Breitbart is the same Milo who, under the name Milo Andreas Wagner, self-published a slim volume of verse, Eskimo Papoose.

Why the youthful choice of a Germanic pseudonym with antisemitic associations? Presumably the Wagner/Yiannopolous forthcoming memoir, Dangerous, will elucidate. Meanwhile, there was a clue in the acknowledgments to Eskimo Papoose; in a proof copy available online, Wagner/Yiannopoulos credited “many inspirational artists and thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, Esther Ritchie, Gilles Deleuze and Myra Ellen Amos”. Writing, later, for the Catholic Herald, he reverted to Yiannopoulos.

Reportedly a great power in the world of video games, the writer is probably best known, beyond his hobbyist following, for having posted Twitter comments so hateful that he was last year banned from using that platform. Thus persecuted, Yiannopoulos was soon adding another career, in free speech, as the hammer of thin-skinned “snowflakes”, who understandably feel there is something deeply unacceptable about, say, calling transgender people “retarded”.

He seems to have found his vocation, for now, within the great, liberal-baiting tradition whose practitioners have included, in this country, Auberon Waugh, Julie Burchill, Taki, David Starkey, AA Gill, Rod Liddle, Jeremy Clarkson and any number of lesser exhibits now clustered around the Spectator. What seems to have placed Yiannopoulos, lacking their writing talent, ahead of many more experienced irritants, who had to make a name without any help from Twitter mobs, Breitbart or safe spaces, is a combination of physical charm and astonishing verbal ugliness. Generally, earlier exponents have been apt, when facing the prospect of lasting career damage or ignominy, to succumb to nerves and feign amazement that their words could have upset anyone.

Indeed, the effectiveness of Yiannopolous’s different tactic, of continually ramping up his abuse, suggests, as with the successfully loutish Nigel Farage and brave experiments in gay-trolling on The Grand Tour, a climate in which there is now more to lose, professionally, from restraint. The allegedly snowflake-damaged era finds safe spaces for men who could have been schooled in offence-giving by David Irving, the Holocaust denier. In a 1991 speech, shortly before he was hired by the Sunday Times, Irving said, when it came to insulting Auschwitz survivors: “Ridicule isn’t enough, you’ve got to be tasteless about it. You’ve got to say things like more women died on the back seat of Edward Kennedy’s car at Chappaquiddick than in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.”

As for Yiannopoulos, his lesson to future provocateurs (as trolling professionals prefer to be designated) is that it’s not enough to express your reservations about, say, women; you must, as a lone speaker of unpopular truths, call them fat, thick, ugly. When these targets protest against guest appearances, the menacer is neatly recast as gagged victim. He has complained: “There’s a problem in popular culture. People are not allowed to say things that are true or real.” In his case, this orchestrated marginalisation culminated in an invitation from Simon & Schuster.

In the writer’s own words, he “spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions. I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building, but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.” The $250,000 deal, still way less than the £400,000 that Penguin paid for Pippa Middleton’s Celebrate, has duly horrified the people that Yiannopoulos makes a living from horrifying; it appears to have stunned readers who may have thought big publishers only brought out sensible books by nice people.

“Shame on @simonschuster”, or words to that effect, said people who never blamed Verso for publishing the Trump supporter Slavoj Žižek, or Random House for Blair or, for that matter, decided to leave Twitter when it still hosted Yiannopoulos. But if this ethical watchfulness catches on, the publisher – Hodder – which commissioned Boris Johnson’s Shakespeare: The Riddle of Genius may come, with the return, post-referendum, of his £500,000 advance, to think it got off lightly.

Even his most loyal fans must wonder how and in what voice the campus entertainer will construct an entire memoir

It is no excuse for the publisher’s critics that Yiannopoulos’s book will be brought out by Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of the type that several conglomerates now run, whether to protect their brand or to reassure readers that they are guaranteed a read that is cast-iron, 100% odious. Threshold Editions’ current strapline (one of its authors is about to become US president) is the triumphalist: “Celebrating 10 years of being right”. The editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review of Books, Adam Morgan, will not be featuring any Simon & Schuster authors for a year. It’s hard, he admits, on guiltless writers, but their publisher needs correcting, in a way that it evidently did not when it was promoting Donald Trump (whom Yiannopoulos calls “Daddy”) during his election campaign. “How is handing a purveyor of hate speech a $250,000 megaphone,” Morgan asks, “not condoning his rhetoric?”

The current controversy, being another kind of megaphone, has naturally magnified the life and dismal words of Yiannopoulos as never before, along with his heartbreaking claim, as a rich Breitbart star currently enjoying a national speaking tour of US colleges and universities, to be a free-speech martyr, censored by phoney victims. If that weren’t counterproductive enough, for anyone who wanted to frustrate this writer’s path to glory, reporting of his university speeches also confirms that critics may have more to gain if the first big Yiannopoulos book comes out conventionally, unlike his self-published poetry.

If denied, by his editors, the extremes of name-calling and bullying that would bring Simon & Schuster into further disrepute, even Yiannopoulos’s most loyal fans must wonder how and in what voice the campus entertainer will construct an entire memoir, even one heaving with the fabulous portraits and sexual disclosures that are also his trademark. Penguin had merely to invent, for Pippa Middleton, a personality. Simon & Schuster, in the US, must finesse lines such as “never feel bad for mocking a transgender person”, or “thick-as-pig shit media Jew”, so as to vindicate its claim that “we do not and never have condoned discrimination or hate speech in any form”.

And what if Yiannopoulos does, with help from his publisher, manage to pass off a shortish history in concerted abuse as a gracious, non-hate-ridden meditation that confirms, to supporters of Daddy, that the real authoritarians are progressives? The very best way to help that happen would be, by agitating against the book’s publication, to supply the necessary victimhood. Just don’t buy it.