by Tim Fenton

Last August, I noted that Private Eye had turned its attention to the bear pit that is Maily Telegraph blogs, and made the assertion that contributors were ranked according to the number of hits their posts garnered each month

This did not go down at all well with Damian Thompson, editor of Telegraph blogs, who took issue with, well, the whole article.

But now it turns out ranking contributors was exactly what was being done, and Thompson was the one doing it, although the practice has recently been abandoned.

We know this because of an uncharacteristic bout of candour from one of those contributors.

Step forward the loathsome Toby Young, who has announced his departure from providing nourishment to those drifting around the comments sewer of Telegraph blogs and joined Rupe’s downmarket troops as a pundit.

In his valedictory post, Tobes tells of being a Telegraph blogger

The prospect was a little daunting, not helped by the fact that, at the end of each week, Damian would email all the other bloggers with a kind of league table, ranking us according to how many hits our posts had got in the past seven days

I soon learned one of the perennial facts about Telegraph Blogs: no matter how prolific or fascinating you are, you will never be as popular as James Delingpole. He always comes first

Perhaps it was someone else and not Toby Young who told the Eye: “He’s always number one, because he really is batshit mad”.

There are, for Toby Young and his now former colleagues, limits to the outpouring of candour.