Toby Young wasn’t pushed: he jumped. This is a critical point, because his disgraced departure from the Office for Students should in no way let this increasingly shambolic government off the hook.

Toby Young resigns from the Office for Students after backlash Read more

He was appointed to a post for which he is supremely unqualified because he is a Tory pundit who is friends with his former Spectator editor, Boris Johnson, and the foreign secretary’s brother, the new transport minister Jo Johnson. This was gratuitous nepotism.

That his vile tweets are somehow a surprise is barely worth indulging: he has spent his entire adult life cultivating a toxic persona, and he was taken to task on national television by Labour’s Stella Creasy for leering over an MP’s breasts as far back as 2013.

His support for “progressive eugenics”, his denouncing of wheelchair ramps and his reference to a “functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six”, his homophobic use of “penis breath” and suggesting a gay man wanted to “bum” a straight man, his “joking” about masturbating over starving African children and having his “dick” up a woman’s “arse”, his almost obsessive ogling over breasts – these were not comments made in his teens, or 20s, or even 30s, but in his 40s. And even when they were exposed, the prime minister defended his appointment, while Boris Johnson defended his mate’s “caustic wit”.

I am no champion of the now departed education secretary, Justine Greening, a Tory who voted for every unjust Tory policy going, from the bedroom tax to slash-and-burn cuts. But what does it say about a party that finds a place for a knuckle-dragging, unqualified egotist because he’s friends with the Tory old boys’ network, while sidelining a gay, northern, comprehensively educated woman?

Why did this episode happen in the first place? Because the British right wants a culture war. They invited it. They relish little else than riling leftwing “snowflakes”. The more – as they see it – the left howls, and froths, and whines in self-righteous indignation, the better. And so they seek, in a calculated manner, to provoke offence. There is one slight hiccup in seeking this culture war. It is one of the factors that is rendering the Tories toxic for younger Britons who increasingly reject racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. They see obnoxious rightwingers revelling in and competing over being as crude, nasty and vicious as possible about women, ethnic minorities, immigrants and gay, lesbian and trans people, and they feel repulsed. More sensible Tories see this, but my word are they drowned out.

Which brings me finally to Boris Johnson. Here is a man with a back catalogue of homophobia, sexism and racism just as extensive as Toby Young’s. Why is he still foreign secretary? If Toby Young is unsuitable for the Office of Students, why is Johnson – who joked about “tank-topped bumboys”, “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” and clearing away Libya’s dead bodies – appropriate as Britain’s face to the world?

Free speech works both ways – as Toby Young is finding out | Dawn Foster Read more

Oh, and spare me this whining about Twitter mobs: Young was too much even for Tory backbenchers and the Mail on Sunday. The real bully, in any case, is a tabloid press that whips up bile and hatred to a readership of millions. The simple fact is the right wants a culture war. It has spent years whipping it up. And the only reason it is howling now is it fears, quite justifiably, that it is going to lose it.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist