The guests on the Marr show earlier today included Theresa May and Jon Ashworth MP along with Fraser Nelson and Polly Toynbee who came along to help Andrew review the papers. Unfortunately one of the spaces on the sofa used to discuss the papers was vacant. Apparently another equally radical Journalist had been invited along but chose to stay away from our screens. His name is Toby Young. His sexist and otherwise offensive tweets and articles were mentioned to Mrs May who has approved his appointment as a member of the Office for Students. Our Prime Minister claims he is still acceptable because of what he has achieved for Free Schools and that she was unaware of his tweets when she approved his appointment. However this will change if he tweets or write such opinions in the future. This view seems consistent with the opinion expressed by Fraser Nelson at the beginning of the programme, that because these tweets happened when Toby was younger, in his mid 40’s they are considered a matter of history. The response from the Prime Minister who approved the appointment suggests two things:

The first is that the Government’s current attitude towards social media is that the past is the past and anything written in the past, even if only a year or two ago by a high profile journalist or pseudo politician in their mid 40’s or 50’s is not a problem when it comes to public appointments. Perhaps in that respect Theresa May is thinking of the way in which people like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump behave now and maybe she is preparing the ground to ensure that she can offer a job to Katie Hopkins without any criticism? However I do know that other people who are less well known to the elite have been sacked, prosecuted or denied jobs because of their use of social media so this is definitely a matter of one rule for people like Toby, Boris, Donald and possibly Katie and a totally different set of rules for the rest of us.

The second is that the Government either does not bother checking the social media history of people who are due to be offered public roles or that they do check such things and then don’t inform Ministers who are expected to approve the appointments. This places them deeply at odds with the rest of society. If it is the former, then this adds to the concerns that I have about Parliament’s approach to IT security. Although Toby Young wrote many deeply offensive things, he never threatened to kill or maim members of Parliament or the Royal Family. It is this concern that I wrote about before Christmas and led to me launching this petition to demand that Parliament carries out an IT audit as part of their cyber security strategy. Many of us would hope that Parliament was at the cutting edge of such an important matter, however based on Mrs May’s comments, the Government is really quite relaxed about such matters, or at least when it relates to people they consider to be their friends.