We’ve all visited the land of idiocy – but Ben Bradley still lives there

Digital footprints really can be a bind. One minute, you’re a YouTube sensation being paid thousands to appear on a reality TV show; the next, you’re in the tabloids for saying something racist, sexist or a bit of both when you were 14.

In some ways, it’s fitting that Ben Bradley, the Conservatives’ vice-chair for youth, should have experienced what is a particularly adolescent kind of disgrace. Last week, Buzzfeed News unearthed some of his old blogposts, in which a 22-year-old Bradley had written that vasectomies could be one way to stop unemployed people, or “a vast sea of unemployed wasters”, as he put it, having too many kids.

It’s almost an exact rerun of what happened to Labour’s Jared O’Mara last year, when offensive posts he had made to a music forum in 2004 were unearthed.

Naturally Bradley – Al Murray, if he’d become an estate agent instead of a pub landlord – has apologised. “My time in politics has allowed me to mature and I now realise that this language is not appropriate,” he said.

It’s not so much a rejection of the sentiment, then, as the language and it’s such an “I’m sorry if you were upset” move that I’m surprised the Tories aren’t making him sleep in the spare room.

The occasionally viral LBC radio host James O’Brien defended Bradley on air, suggesting that everyone should be allowed to make mistakes in their early 20s and that if we don’t forgive youthful indiscretions, we’ll be left with a strange breed of politicians who are suspiciously thick-skinned and impervious to criticism.

Most people are idiots in their early 20s. I was an idiot in my early 20s. My time as an adult has allowed me to mature and I now realise that the following beliefs are no longer appropriate: that coats on a night out are a southern affectation, that the Klaxons deserved to win the Mercury prize over Amy Winehouse and that wine is a suitable mixer for spirits. But surely there has to be a cut-off point and surely, for 28-year-old Bradley, 22 is pushing it.

I don’t mean to show off here, but even in my idiotic youth, I didn’t think that sterilisation was a way of preventing poor people from breeding, nor did I think police brutality was a fair response to the 2011 riots. I just thought frosted tips were a reasonable addition to any head of hair and for that I apologise wholeheartedly.