Reactionary Imperative?

Toby Young has gone, the Junior Minister who appointed him has been moved with a view to managing him out next time, and the Cabinet Minister is off to the backbenches. Jo Johnson may have been wrong to suggest that Twitter went back to the 1980s, but the trends that have come to a head in this case do go that far back, with roots that stretch even deeper into the past.

It is not just a matter of being permitted to be as obnoxious as you please, provided that you are posh enough, although there is that. It is not just a matter of being given paid public appointments based on being people's mate rather than any qualification for the job, although there is that, too.

It is the deep ideological split between those who see "progressive eugenics" as an acceptable or even a compulsory opinion, such as Toby Young, and those who most certainly do not, such as my erstwhile editor for The American Conservative, and now Deputy Editor of The Spectator, Freddy Gray, who had to try and defend Young on today's Daily Politics, but who, to his credit, barely attempted to do so.

This is a Mel Bradford moment, the occasion of a split as deep, and as deeply rooted, as that between the neoconservatives and the paleoconservatives. A split, in fact, not unrelated to that one. This time, though, the neocons have lost. Freddy Gray for the job that is now vacant? Why ever not? Or what is Stuart Reid doing these days? Then again, they could always co-opt the paleocon-friendly Left in the person of someone like Neil Clark, bypassing both the municipal Labour Right in education, and the Liberal Establishment in academia and the media.