TOBY YOUNG was the wrong person for appointment to the Office for Students board and the government’s methods of slipping him in were as bent as a clockwork orange.

Shorn of diplomatic adornment, that is the verdict from Commissioner for Public Appointments Peter Riddell, whose report details a catalogue of corruption by the Tories to get their preferred candidate onto the board of the universities regulator.

If a trade union, local authority or any other public body receiving state cash had adopted such partial procedures to subvert an appointment procedure, ministers would have been in uproar, demanding that heads should roll.