By Ben Pensant

Let’s talk about the white man. He can’t help himself can he? Coasting through life, paying for nothing, shoving his wealth in minority faces like a privileged peacock flaunting its voluminous plumage in front of a one-legged pigeon covered in sticky Tizer. But as if that wasn’t problematic enough, he now thinks he has the Allah-given right to debase social media by cracking the kind of misogynist jokes even Roy ‘Fatty’ Brown would reject for being ‘a bit fookin’ sexist, that’.

Indeed, you’d struggle to find a creature as selfish, violent and downright offensive in all seven volumes of JK Roland’s Fascistic Bastards And Where To Punch Them. And hot on the heels of Tory toff Toby Jones’ exposure as the type of beast who uses phrases like ‘penis breath’ on the internet, along comes yet another Caucasian male elevated to a position of power despite having said some naughty stuff on Twitter.

But at least we can give Toby one tiny crumb of credit: he should have known better. As an Oxford graduate he is clearly educated enough to realise how plain wrong it was to make silly comments about The Full Monty director Katie Boyle’s tits. And he will be acutely aware that penning columns expressing unpopular opinions about wheelchair ramps would one day be used against him by members of the Purity Police who’d never actually read them.

Toby’s crime was not that he didn’t realise he’d offended all decent people but that he didn’t care. A shameless contrarian, his sin was to reject the left-wing values found in every Oxford-educated actor, Labour MP or Guardian journalist who’s ever lived off a trust fund while campaigning passionately for the many not the few.

None of which can be said about white males further down the social ladder who, denied the breeding and education squandered by Toby, have no idea there is anything wrong with making jokes about how big a female backbencher’s wobblers are. Let’s face it, explaining the misogyny of Toby’s dark Twitter past to the average working-class man is like trying to pin diarrhoea to a wall: we’re talking about a creature whose idea of Doing Better is to promise his teenage wife he’ll only rape her once a week.

And as anyone who’s read the terrifying tweets sent by former Man City striker Gary Neville knows all too well, there is no nest of working-class vipers more poisonous than the world of soccer. For readers who wisely avoid a sport watched and played by racist sex-pests who can’t read, Neville was recently handed the job of managing the Great Britain ladies’ team. As tends to happen, before he had time to lace up his boots someone had unearthed a horrific ‘quip’ he made online in 2011, the content of which is not for the faint-hearted: (Readers of a nervous Mary Whitehouse disposition may want to skip the next paragraph in case they get so outraged they shit their legs off.)

“When I said morning men I thought the women would of been busy preparing breakfast/getting kids ready/making the beds – sorry morning women!”

Sickening. So sickening that on first reading I was that sickened I didn’t even notice the poor grammar and punctuation. Or that it scans about as smoothly as a Richy Wire lyric about the link between Stalinism and housework sung backwards by a tramp. But Neville wasn’t finished, verbally assaulting his own sister Tracey the same year after she admonished the tight-arsed millionaire for forcing her to go halfers on a meal:

“U women of always wanted equality until it comes to paying the bills #hypocrites”

Jesus. I dread to think what kind of bullying this poor girl was subjected to while growing up with such an animal. And doubtless the regular beatings she received from Neville and his younger brother Neville left the kind of mental scars white males like Neville and Neville have been inflicting on innocent victims like Neville since time immortal.

Needless to say, Neville pulled the Get Out Of Jail Free card beloved of supremacists everywhere and claimed his vile, poorly worded tweets were ‘jokes’. Yes, Gary, much like Harvey Weinstein was just having a laugh when he forced women to watch him wank off into plant-pots and Hitler was merely pulling the legs of the six million Jews he sent to gas chambers. (Right after he went mad and invented Zionism, obvs.)

And his defence that he was ‘only joking’ is particularly unconvincing when you realise he once targeted the mother of his children too:

“Relax I’m back chilled – just battered the wife!!! Feel better now!”

Wow. Well done, Gary. In one tweet you contrived to alert the world to your secret life as a domestic abuser AND pen a one-liner ten times less amusing than Die Hard star Mel Gibson telling his ex-wife she deserved to get ‘raped by a pack of niggers’.

But even worse, in a grim example of the psychological hold violent white men have over their victims, Neville’s brainwashed wife Judy leapt to his defence with surely the worst case of Stackhouse Syndrome since Patty Smith was kidnapped by the Michigan Militia. Calling her brutal captor ‘a wonderful husband and father’ she said she ‘could not be prouder’ of him, the dark combination of crippling fear and internalised misogyny clearly blinding the poor woman to her husband’s evil.

I’ve no doubt Neville stood over his tearful wife as she wrote those hollow words, handful of hair in one fist and a tyre iron in the other. There’s no other explanation for such irrational behaviour. Unless you’re one of her hubby’s legion of alt-right apologists who think Julia might just know her partner of twenty years considerably better than a hysterical mob of Mary Whitehouse devotees who hadn’t heard of him a week ago.

Thankfully, those mobsters were out on force on social media, demanding Neville be sacked with a level of passion and principle not seen since the last time they demanded someone be sacked for saying something they didn’t like. And they were commendably backed up by important figures from women’s soccer, some of whom’s names the pitchfork-wielders even knew.

Because being involved with, having an interest in, or even knowing the slightest thing about the subject you’re outraged by is of no interest to the permanently offended. You think the middle-class liberals celebrating the World Darts Federation’s decision to stop using walk-on girls would be seen dead watching overweight lager louts throw arrows at a wall while half-naked women wearing paper crowns feed them Silk Cuts and Scampi Fries? No chance. But we’ll happily go out of our way to try and stop it if there are virtue points on the table.

Similarly, you can’t simply say that Gary Neville lacks the neccessary experience to be an international manager. No, you have to say he’s totally unsuitable due to being a rampant misogynist. And you can’t just say that you believe a female football team should have a female manager. No, you have to claim the decision is part of a widespread conspiracy to keep women in their place by overloooking them in favour of a hateful chauvinist who thinks it’s funny to rob and beat up female relatives.

Because the smug satisfaction of knowing someone has been punished for wrongspeak is the modern left’s bread and butter. And the people actually affected by our principled hounding campaigns? Utterly irrelevant; any idiot knows the feelings of a handful of social media curtain-twitchers are far more important.

Feelings which were trampled all over by FIFA, who yesterday confirmed that Neville would remain as Team GB manager despite our best efforts to have him banished from public life forever. Hmm, I wonder what tipped the balance for this milky-skinned, Y chromosome millionaire? It’s a mystery…

Meanwhile, people who would have a heart attack if they spent five minutes in a football stadium have to live with knowing that terrified women are spending their days on muddy fields being rugby tackled by a wife-beating brute with Bernard Manning’s joke-book stuffed down his shorts.

Needless to say, Neville called the job ‘the ultimate’. I can’t for the life of me think why a sexist oaf would say such a thing about a role that involves mansplaining and hanging out in women’s changing rooms. Another mystery…

But there’s no mystery as to what drives Neville to walk this earth doing and saying whatever he likes: his penis and pigmentation are all the evidence you need. And once again, the legacy of colonialism has handed an open goal to yet another white man who takes what he wants without a second thought for those less privileged. Back of the net, as they say at Lord’s.

Still, at least once St Jezza re-takes this godforsaken country we’ll mercifully see the back of such entitled behaviour. It’s not like the modern Labour Party would ever give a woman’s role to a misogynist, is it?