Apparently accuracy, attention-to-detail and proof-reading were not on the curriculum at Eton when the young George Young was educated there.
Or -- to give new Tory Chief Whip Georgie his full name -- George Samuel Knatchbull Young (6th Baronet)!
Just hours after he was appointed as Chief Whip to replace the disgraced, unfrocked and de-cycle-clipped Andrew Mitchell, bloggers exhumed the long-forgotten nugget that a youthful Sir George Young -- with two of his then Savile-bait-age kids -- had featured in a British Rail poster with Jimmy Savile in 1982.
A copy of the poster appears lurking on a page of George Young's official website
Apparently not-so-young George has been too absorbed this past month with the possibility of getting back into government as a replacement for the universally-loathed Andrew Mitchell to notice that the plebbish disc jockey beaming from a page on his website is someone whose name and smirking likeness must now be totally expunged from one's history.
(Tech note to George Young: Delete text and image. Empty cache and refresh page).
Alas when George Young supervised the creation of his hagiographic website, he didn't bother to proof-read the text that accompanied the BR poster. A minor point of accuracy that some people think is the sort of skill that those in government should consider mastering.
Jimmy Savile has been a prominent national figure for 50 years. Long enough that the spelling of his surname isn't exactly a state secret.
Margaret Thatcher -- who proposed him for his knighthood in June 1990 -- certainly knew how to spell the name of her buddy on the invitations she frequently sent him to visit her at Chequers during her eleven-year reign.
But there it is on Young's website.... Savile's surname spelled incorrectly.
George gave him 'ell alright. An extra "L" in his surname! Spelling the name SaviLLe instead of Savile (just one "L").
Howzabout that then guys 'n' gals?! Perhaps Eton didn't crack the educational whip sufficiently on young George...
UPDATE!
GEORGE YOUNG FOLLOWS MY ADVICE AND SCRUBS SAVILE FROM HIS WEBSITE!
Golly gosh! That was quick! No sooner than we draw attention to the proudly displayed British Rail poster of Sir George Young and his Youngsters with Jimmy Savile on Georgie's website -- replete with embarrassing spelling error -- and make the suggestion that he launder his site -- than he actually undertakes the expungement!
With all the ruthless efficiency of Stalin air-brushing Trotsky out of the official Communist Party photographs -- George Young, aided no doubt by some Conservative Central Office apparatchik such as Michael Green (aka Grant Shapps) who knows a thing or two about deleting embarrassing websites -- has cleansed his website of all traces of Jimmy Savile!
Fortunately for those that care about Tory posterity, we have the before and after screen-grabs to document the rewriting of history...
NOW YOU SEE IT...
NOW YOU DON'T!
