Jason Arday: Cambridge’s woke poster boy or smear campaign victim?

0:03The Telegraph. He's gone. Dr Jason Arday, the Nobel Prize winning Olympic athlete, has resigned in the wake of a plagiarism scandal. Who should be held culpable for the Cambridge professor's undoing? Is he a victim of positive discrimination imploding? Crooked candidates to the left of me, crypto fraudster donors to the right. what has gone wrong with the state of our political parties. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

0:45Jacob Rees-Mogg, welcome back to The Daily Tea. Thank you for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. It's a rare treat because I come on sometimes when you're on holiday and you look as if you've been enjoying a holiday. Yeah. But very rarely the two of us, so it's fun to be... saying I look brown. You do, yes. Well, thank you very much. You look very tanned. Yeah, I've been doing my best. We're also going to discuss The Telegraph's top story, which is Jason Arday. Before we get into that, I'd like to begin. Did you have any eccentric professors when you were at university? Well, the wonderful Norman Stone was around when I was up at Oxford, who was terrific fun, interesting, thoughtful, and enjoyed a drink or two.

1:24He did. There's the famous story about when he was at a party with Margaret Thatcher, and he had just come back from America, and he drank so much that he collapsed, and there was an enormous crash as he pulled a table down with him. And Margaret Thatcher looked at him with pity and said, poor Norman, it must be the jet lag.

1:47Margaret Thatcher was a remarkably kindly person. Yeah. This is a surprising thing people don't realize about her. played the piano i didn't know that she played the piano yes and also went for the piano was her forte it's very good very good now we're going to talk about uh professor jason arday who last night sadly resigned as professor of magic and head of gwiffindor at jesus college and this follows the telegraph revealing that he claimed to have published a book of which we can find no evidence. The book was called Being Young, Black and Male, Challenging the Dominant Discourse. It was listed in his biography description in published essays as well as promotional material for events.

2:29But there is no evidence that the book has ever existed. And I don't know if that was the final straw or what it was. But he resigned with a resignation letter in which he talked about how his story will continue. The criticism has been overwhelming, but he's going to step aside and we'll see what Jason Arday does next. Invent penicillin. I don't know. I just want to get your instant reaction to the whole story as you've been following it. What have you made of the character of Jason Arday? Well, there are these watermitty characters that this happens. You get people who pretend to be kings. You know, it's not a common problem, but it is a problem that occurs throughout history of people thinking that they've done all sorts of things that they have not done.

3:15I would hold Cambridge much more culpable than I would hold our day because Cambridge has promoted him, decided he was a poster boy for their DEI policies, has given him a public profile that when it turned out to have some errors in it, has come crashing down on him. So he, poor man, seems to be a bit of a fantasist and takes all the blame for this and must be having quite an unpleasant time. him, Cambridge just shrugs its shoulders and say, we'll have another investigation. And now he's gone. It's not really our problem. But actually, it is Cambridge's problem. And I think Cambridge has behaved atrociously in promoting somebody without having checked.

3:52And there's been pushback saying he's getting an unreasonable amount of publicity. Well, that's only because Cambridge promoted him to make him their poster boy and was so proud of him until he turned out not to be real. I think that's spot on. I'm reluctant to comment upon the state of academia now because I've been out of it for about 15 years. But I did work in it for somewhere around the region of a decade. And when people say, how could this sort of thing happen? I think the answer is that academia is full of mad people. Jason Arday's personality type is quite common. If when I was in a common room, someone had come in and said, I ran a marathon last night in two and a half minutes, we wouldn't have batted an eyelid.

4:36That's perfectly normal. And one problem with that is that those people who have these character flaws also manage the institutions because academia largely manages itself. So the other question is, how could some people have promoted this person? Well, if you look at the people who appointed him and you look at their own resumes, they've written a lot of work which is in a similar area to Jason Arday's. So this is a cohort of people to whom his personality would have seemed actually quite normal, I suspect, and his area of work would have seemed current and very relevant and exactly the sort of thing that we should have been promoting.

5:17The problem with Arday, actually, and I think it's almost a little bit unfair that we focused on all stuff like claiming to run all these marathons, claiming to have been on 7-Up. The real issue is the plagiarism in the thesis. That's actually the one crime that academia normally wouldn't tolerate. Yes, that's absolutely right. But plagiarism and quoting are bedfellows, aren't they? And academics constantly quote each other. Indeed, it's quite flattering to be referred to by a fellow academic. And so plagiarism is always quite hard to prove absolutely. Yes. Because I understand that in his thesis, he did have in the bibliography, the other academic whose work he relied on heavily.

6:01Now, the question is, was it properly footnated when he quoted long chunks of it? And then there are other occasions when he seems to have created experiences that person X has had and has been reported to have and has applied it to person Y, as if it were his own original research. So I think there are issues around is plagiarism. But plagiarism is rarely as clear cut as all that. Until I tell you that I wrote the words, in the beginning, God said, let there be light. And there was light. And that would be clear plagiarism. Yes, I think it's when plagiarism tips over into cutting and pasting.

6:33But I take the point that academia is all about... Legitimacy in academia comes from showing that you've done the reading and that you're adding to what has come before. In that regard, it's surprisingly conservative. The philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, who appear to just simply make stuff up in their head and put it on the page, that's not normally how scholarship works at all. It's about demonstrating you're coming from a tradition and you're building upon or correcting what has been there before. So I can see how those mistakes are made. For me, the central tragedy, though, of the R.

7:06Day story is that he was writing about what he would call systemic blocks to minorities getting on in higher education. But his scandal will have convinced some people that actually not only those blocks aren't there, but the education is biased towards minority people. Now, I don't think that's true, because if nothing else, you know, restore voters can relax. Academia is still overwhelmingly white, right? Like the country. but nonetheless he will give encouragement to those who think that academia is this kind of conspiracy against the public because much of his own story looks like a conspiracy against the public yes i'm sure you're right about that um i'm sure that people will take his promotion his success which seems now to be bogus as an argument for saying there's a two-tier promotion in academia and that if you're a white man, you're probably held back.

8:07Whereas if you're black, you will get the promotion. I expect that's true to an extent as well, that Cambridge seemed to have promoted him so much because he was a young black professor. That was what was exciting about him. Had he been an elderly white male, we would not be talking about him now, however much plagiarism he'd done, not because of racism, but because he'd never have been promoted and we would never have heard of him and Cambridge would not have been as proud of him. Yeah, but they were excited about him because it was rare. That's the thing. I mean, I come back to, again, I think some people think that they're going to walk into a university and it's like 99 % black, lesbian, and everyone in wheelchairs.

8:45It's really not. It's still dominated by well-educated white people. But they seized upon him precisely because he was countering a cliche about their industry that they were embarrassed by. This is where positive discrimination tends to blow up because you find that you promote people who are promoted for the wrong reasons. And so you need not to worry about the diversity of universities at all. You just need to employ very, very clever people. And the same should apply to the entrance system. It should be done on academic merit and should be color and sex blind. Yeah. And when something like our day happens, it's very unfair upon people from minority backgrounds who have made it in the system because it causes people to doubt their qualifications.

9:34This is absolutely right. And I think it's one of the real evils of positive discrimination is that it makes people assume that anybody who is a woman or is from an ethnic minority has got their not-all merit but for other reasons. And that in most cases is going to be wrong. And therefore, positive discrimination ends up damaging the people it seeks to help. It's one of the reasons I'm so strongly opposed to it. And one other thing I want to add, and I know it just sounds like I'm being a shill here for a higher education, but he has helped to damage the reputation of an entire sphere of life, which is very concerning, is, of course, much of higher education is engineering, maths, science.

10:15He is a canary in the coal mine for a bit of it that's gone a bit mad, which is sociology, right? And the way that he spoke and he wrote is how some sociologists speak and write now. And it's become sort of detached, it seems to me, from the ordinary academic standard. For instance, it's obsessed with biography. And you look at the intersectionality of Jason Ardey's experience. I mean, that's one reason why this story has captured the imagination, because of aspects of his character that he has drawn attention to. Neurodiversity, being black, coming from a deprived background, all those sorts of things.

10:52That field of writing is, to me, obsessively biographical. and people who think that scholarship is principally about facts and figures, which it isn't by the way, it's also about analysis and creativity, but for those who think it is about facts and figures, the very existence of a sociology of higher education to them looks like academia disappearing up its own bottom. Well, he also seems to have the bingo list of DEI qualifications, doesn't he? And that must create suspicion that it seems to be overdone, that too much of it is all put onto him and then everything is about him in what he's trying to explain.

11:30So I think people understandably get very suspicious of this. It was all a bit too good to be true. And a general lesson in life is things that are too good to be true tend not to be true. And that's where the fantasy comes into it. This is the sort of my own truth style. We're into Duchess of Sussex type woo-woo-ishness when you get into that. And I think it does give sociology a bad name. I'm not convinced sociology is a proper subject, but that may be the bias of an historian. To quote his resignation letter, sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack.

12:05While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, well, not this sort of criticism, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and those I love. I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues, and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope. Some people have suggested that the letter itself looks as though it was written by AI.

12:42But there is a different interpretation, which is that Jason Arday writes in a way that sounds an awful lot like AI. Because that's what a lot of people do nowadays, isn't it? It's almost a box ticking exercise of cliches. It's a form of jargon, but it's a kind of a faux scholarly kind of jargon wrapped up with an impression of deep compassion. it's using long words where short ones will do which is not a sign of scholarship but the reverse long words quite fun yeah but this type of verbiage i don't think helps explain anything and stuff about journeys and all that it doesn't really get you anywhere in my view what he needs to say is i'm very sorry i've made a mistake i'm therefore resigning i didn't publish this book i I had intended to, and other people have listed books they were intending to publish, and I'm sorry I didn't make it clear that it was en route.

13:44I made some mistakes about how many marathons I'd done in half an hour and all this sort of stuff, rather than a very self-justifying, verbose piece of correspondence. I don't think his letter particularly helps him. Has this seized the public imagination because this is silly season, and he has the misfortune for this to have broken at a time in which there isn't much else to talk about? or does it really touch an open sore with the public? Oh, I think it's silly season. I don't think this would get a lot of attention on the day that Andy Burnham was becoming prime minister. We would be talking about Andy Burnham becoming prime minister.

14:20This would be a nib in those circumstances. Right. It does, however, tie into all sorts of other things because there's the DEI question, there's positive discrimination, there's the excitement of a story that is all made up people like a fantasy but there's then the police investigating the journalist from the times higher educational supplement which is really serious what business did the police have investigating a journalist who was doing his job yes and this is not something that's beyond normal criticism it's a journal read by a few experts in their field. It's not doorstepping. It was a few emails saying, can you explain your position?

15:04And it seems to me that that's one of the most serious bits of this, which ties in with concerns that we've had about two-tier policing with Henry Novak, with the police taking any accusation of racism very seriously, and racism being the default card for people to play if they are of a different race from the two of us when they get into any difficulties. And that, I think, is important and comes out of this. But the basic story itself, somebody fakes a CV at England's second university is not necessarily the biggest story in the world. No, it's not. But I agree. What you tease out there, it seems every step of it seemed to tread on a toe, an inflamed toe of public opinion, of which involving the police is the most interesting one.

15:51So you make outlandish claims and then when you're scrutinized, you call the cops in. But also, I think there would have been more tolerance for him overall if we hadn't had about 10 years of woke being rammed down our throats. And so it feels a bit like here is a chance to pin the blame on one character and by attacking him, sort of expel the woke from our system, expose it and expel it. So do you think it would have been a big story even in ordinary time? I think it probably would have been, actually. I do think that. And I also have felt uncomfortable about it because I think there's an element of mob rule about it.

16:32I put it this way. I don't like it when any individual suddenly you can see everyone turns on them, even sometimes when they're actually guilty. There's just a part of me that instinctively doesn't like to see that. I'd rather them go through due process and for the whole thing to be handled quietly because Jason Arday ultimately didn't kill anyone. No, no, he hasn't done anything terribly seriously. He is a senior figure in a not very important subject at a university that thinks it's frightfully important. I don't think his sins are... The joke is on them rather than the public. I agree with that.

17:06And as I was saying earlier, I think Cambridge's behaviour is much worse than his. He's made Cambridge look very stupid and incompetent. But, you know, what has he done that's so wicked? Well, let's talk to one of Professor Arde's most prominent defenders, Professor Kahindi Andrews, who has spoken in defence of him on Radio 4, and who was until recently himself a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University. What makes a great pub? Is it the beer, the hospitality, the history? I'm Will Hawks, journalist and co-author of The Telegraph's Guide to the UK's Best Pubs. I've visited thousands of them and enjoyed a few pints along the way in my search for pub perfection.

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18:04Professor Andrews, you have said that the criticism of Jason Arday amounts to a smear campaign that is as predictable as it is baseless. Well, let's deal with those two things separately in reverse order. Baseless. I mean, the mountain of evidence about misrepresentations of things in his private life is one thing. But does the suggestion that there is a considerable amount of plagiarism in his PhD not concern you as an academic? so it does that so there are substantive allegations one of those is the phd interestingly he actually sent me his phd about a year ago because this has been going on for years behind the scenes and we're now seeing it i read through it i put it through plagiarism detection software everything you're seeing in the news i've already seen it's definitely for scholarship it's definitely problematic but it doesn't it doesn't arise a level of plagiarism this is why liverpool john moore's when they investigate it said look there's problems here mainly with supervision around how this probably shouldn't have got through because badly supervised but did it actually damage the academic credibility the findings the uniqueness of it no it didn't and it's not plagiarism so that's why i'm saying it's baseless because that's kind of the underpinning thing around all of this plagiarizes phd when we know he didn't there's been investigations that he didn't so why is this in the news well even if it weren't plagiarism and it were poor scholarship i think what would surprise uh regular people is that cambridge could uh take someone and celebrate them and push them so hard who has been guilty of poor scholarship that in and of itself is troubling right he's a where you're a phd is that you're a student you're learning and so he's not you don't get a phd you don't get a professorship at cambridge because you have a phd many people have phds you get a fellowship at cambridge because of your publications because of your research because of everything else so if someone made made mistakes through sloppy supervision and sloppy work in the past if they've proven they have a straight record of academic excellence I'm not sure why you would think that they should undermine everything else that they've done.

20:05PhD is early. It's not the thing that got him a job at Cambridge. How much do you blame Cambridge for the row that has arisen? Because it seems to me that they were very keen to promote Dr. Arday and to put him forward as an example of how Cambridge was changing and therefore opened him up to this level of scrutiny because that's where the publicity originates. I think the level of scrutiny would have been there anyway since he was hired there's been and I don't know him well so I can't say I'm not close friends but certainly I've spoke to him a couple of times and he complained that literally since he had that job for three since since he soon as it was announced and yes it was probably announced but him being black and in that role has really put some people lost but isn't it fair to question people regardless of their race about honorary professorships that they claimed have that seem not to exist books that they say are published, which may be in the pipeline, but don't seem to be emerging from the pipeline, and the other allegations that have arisen, that regardless of race, people are accountable, and these questions are legitimate questions.

21:13I think my issue here is, if he was not black, we would not be having this conversation. Nobody would go through and troll through the CV, every time someone said something online. If you went to, just look, you took any average Cambridge professional and put them through this amount of scrutiny, you are going to find some inconsistencies. And the fact is, this level of scrutiny is because he's black at Cambridge. It is not some fair idea. And I guess even the thing that the gateway into this is his PhD, which has been proven to not be plagiarism. And so really should have been left there. His PhD has not been proved not to be plagiarism.

21:45It hasn't been proved to be plagiarism, which is slightly different that there are still even you admitted questions about its quality. And it's just a question of whether you're taking a particular standard of proof for that. I just wonder whether it's right that it's only black people who come under this amount of scrutiny, that there are business people over the years who have faked their CVs, and they've come under this huge... I accept that the spotlight of publicity can be an unfair and random thing. And particularly in August, it hits individuals who suddenly become the focus of a national furore over something that in normal circumstances would not be of that much interest but this has happened to other people and they haven't all been black i think it is just a consequence of a free press because the question is why is it why is it newsworthy and this again i really want to stress this is not his cv so the issues which would be substantive to his job phd publications you can say it hasn't approved his pledge there's no evidence if people have looked at this.

22:46People who have expertise, I examine PhDs is what I do. John Moore's have a whole panel looking at this thing. I've said this is this capacity. Establishment have said his PhD, his qualifications, his publications can pass and are fine. And if you were going to tell me that that's the case, why would I possibly think that the journal Higher Education is going to give Jason Arday a pass because he's black? That doesn't happen. Taking today's Telegraph, the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University in the US, Nelson Mandela University in South Africa have also denied claim that he had honorary professorships, which he said he had.

23:18Those are CV points. Those are points you make on a CV. Those are, in fairness, those are claims to answer. I don't know the full details, having spoken to him, people around him. He claims he has evidence for these. I can't say, I don't know. Okay. Right. But that's fair enough. Did those honorary things get him a job at Cambridge? I did. The job at Cambridge is publications, research funding, credit to teaching, those things. is there anything there that would have undermined him getting a position at Cambridge? I haven't seen anything that would suggest it. Professor, I actually don't disagree that this is partly about his colour.

23:55And on this point, you may accuse me here of blaming the victim, but I wonder if what's going on here is a kind of a referendum on wokeness itself, that some people have seized upon him because they make assumptions, fairly or unfairly, that he has been advanced because of his skin color. So therefore, in a sense, he is also a victim of woke, which has introduced this element of doubt into the public's minds as to whether or not people are being promoted on the basis of talent or because the system wants to promote a certain kind of person so it can feel better about itself. Yeah, and I think that's the lie, right?

24:32Is there any evidence that happens? I think the problem is that people assume when he got the job that he shouldn't have the job and have spent the last three years trying to prove that he shouldn't have the job. It's just universities aren't woke. They're really right-wing racist, reactionary places where every black academic will tell you our experiences are horrendous. The idea that you have someone picked out, cherry-picked, given this Lego, it just flies in the face of all evidence, all experience. That's why I've been so, not even defending him particularly, but defending the idea that we can't allow people to be pulled down like this because it really does undermine the idea of black intellectual achievement, right?

25:06that's what people are trying to tell you now. But you see that from the public's point of view, and I've worked in academia myself, so I'm balancing both how it seems as an outsider and insider. But from the public's point of view, universities are not reactionary and racist. They look really left-wing and really woke. And so it'll be very surprising to hear that they are apparently bastions of conservatism. And therefore, they assume when they see someone like Jason R. day's promotion that that is a reflection of how left-wing and woke they are and not actually about his talent. And that's one of the biggest misconceptions about universities.

25:41I mean, it's just simply not the case. I mean, until 1945, racial science was accepted in these universities. The people that believe that I am not a human being are still taught today, actually. The light of it, Ken, Rousseau, Locke, etc., who are still taught today, are those people who believe that actually I'm closer to a monkey than a human being. If you like I said, less than 200 black professors in the whole entire employed in any university so few of us we can't all get a plane together because if it crashes then we're all gone right people like myself being men redundant after 12 years of being very successful if you speak to any black academic they will tell you that there are experiences are not that this is some wonderful place it is a grind it is awful it is terrible there's terrible experiences in fact that's what professor i'day's work was about student experiences staff experiences um and i think this hope i would hope that this story will show you that actually that myth that the university is leftly woke is complete nonsense.

26:34It's actually one of the most reactionary. And I'm somebody, I've said this before and I say again, some of these institutions are the most racist institutions I've stepped foot in. And I include police stations in that too. Universities are horrendous on issues of race. But he didn't have to be perfect to withstand public scrutiny. He just had to give the impression that he was sincere and doing studies that people think is of public benefit. And the problem is, I think he's just fallen down on those two things. However, I entirely understand the point about underrepresentation in higher education.

27:10And I sincerely sympathize with the view that, oh no, this looks like anyone who tries to get on is going to be attacked if they're a person of color. And I understand that I suspect there will be a chill going through parts of Oxbridge as a result of this. But I'm afraid he was just a bad example. And coming out to defend him like this by saying it's a smear when there just seems to be so many clear things that he's done wrong. I just don't think it's good for the cause of trying to decolonize education. He's let the side down. I mean, two things can be true, right? I mean, I think given this level of scrutiny, I don't know that anybody would survive.

27:49I'll be 100 % honest, given the level of scrutiny, given everything he's gone through, you will find inconsistencies. You will find if people really want to pile on, they may pile on. But I do think the alternative, so the alternative to me coming on here and saying, well, look, actually, this is a smear campaign. Maybe it's not the perfect individual. It doesn't change the fact that the smear campaign doesn't change the fact that this was coordinated in the underlying and all the articles I'm seeing now is this proves the DEI is damaging higher education. that's such a terrible narrative so i guess i'm coming on here not to defend the person i'm coming on here to say look we can't take that narrative because that is simply not the case right something terrible has been done to this young man he hasn't stood up to the scrutiny and it really is part of a campaign to to undermine the work that i do that other people do that undermine the positions that we are in or not in i think it is important to make that to make that very very clear that this is not just he did some bad he's been um lying and he's the problem and this is just simply about that?

28:43It isn't. There's a whole backstory about how black academics are getting treated, what the role of this is. And it was a smear campaign. Even if some of it is true, it doesn't change the fact it was a clearly coordinated smear campaign to pull him there. But isn't academia generally competitive, that professors compete against each other for posts and that they examine the quality of other professors' work, and that they're quite brutal when they think the quality of the work is not good enough, and that he shouldn't be protected from this on the grounds of his race. I don't think he should be protected.

29:13That's not the argument I'm making. My point is that given that, and everything you said is true, it is quite brutal, he wouldn't have been given, the premise that he was given the role because he's black and because he was, you know, they needed to have some diversity so they just picked any random black person. That is not how Cambridge worked. He got the role because he's a working man. I accept that, but they're very proud of him because he was black and they based it about that and they seem not to have carried out proper due diligence on the work and on his CV. And that's why I blame Cambridge much more than the individual.

29:43I think being in one of these media storms can't be much fun for him. But in a way, Cambridge has used him to promote its diversity agenda. And it's promoted somebody whose CV hasn't stood up to scrutiny. And that is Cambridge's fault and responsibility. Well, I just don't know that his CV points are unclear. The two main ones are not true. They're actually his economic work early was problematic, but judged to be fine. the voluntary appointments i don't i can't speak to i don't know but most of this storm isn't about cv it's it's about other claims which aren't really related at all and i think that just shows the level to which this is more about trying to discredit him and actually trying to find you know the back it's not about this is the story is not about academic integrity whatsoever i sort of understand that on the other hand if you're an academic and you're a seeker to truth and you say things about how many marathons you ran and the other extraordinary claims that don't seem to be particularly credible the millions that were raised all by him and then it was a team and so on that makes people doubt your truthfulness and as an academic indeed as a politician even more so your truthfulness is fundamental to your reputation and that's a nice idea but it's not really true is it like truth what is true what is what is true isn't simply a there's no proven is another a truth there's an accepted truth there's politics behind it i mean cambridge is some way that had david starkey attached to them for 10 years after he came out and said the whites have become black in 2011 with the riots and still but david starkey is allowed to be attached to a cambridge college that's far more dangerous than jason id exaggerating some things about his his achievements in running in and and making money i mean i think the idea that i think this is also an idea that underpins a lot of this is that somehow cambridge is this elite place where everybody creates this wonderful truth.

31:28That's nonsense. There's some terrible work that comes out of Cambridge, which is more dangerous, the actual work itself, than the people. So, there's just so many things here are not true. The university is not a left-wing place, and Cambridge is not a bastard of truth, and everybody's not perfect in academia. And if you put anybody under this scrutiny, there will be some cracks. Maybe not these better cracks, I admit that, but there will certainly be some cracks. I just want to add that David Starkey, of course, lost his position later on when he referred to Dan Black's. Professor Andres, thank you very much.

31:57Thank you. Thank you. Coming up next from DEI to antisemitism, we discuss the political career of Joshua Bonehill-Payne, whether Tory's right to put him forward as a council candidate.

32:13Nirav Modi was a billionaire diamond tycoon whose jewellery was worn by Hollywood stars like Kate Winslet. But in 2018, he was accused of masterminding one of the world's biggest ever bank frauds, and he disappeared. This is the extraordinary story of the rise and fall of Nirav Modi. And of how we caught him. He was in the news all the time. Where is Nirav Modi? Why can we not find him? He's one of the most sought after criminal in India. You owe a lot of people a lot of money, Mr. Modi, who would very much like to know where you are. Sorry, no comment. The Indians will think we're a laughingstock.

32:54Here we are seven years later still speaking about this case. They think it's a sham. The Diamond King, a new podcast from The Telegraph. With me, Mick Brown. And me, Robert Mendick. Out now.

33:13Jacob, picking up on our discussion about Jason Arday, Zach Polanski has come to his defense and said that black people are held to a higher standard. But so are Green Party leaders. One can imagine Zach looking into someone's eyes and saying, I will inflate your grades. And of course, he's been a disaster as a party leader, living on a barge, not paying all his taxes, etc. And it does raise the question of, how do we end up with such bad politicians? And this brings one to the subject of a fellow called Joshua Bonehill Payne, a former neo-Nazi who carried out a campaign of anti-Semitic abuse against a Jewish MP, went to prison, reformed, has denounced his past views.

33:58No one's disputing that. But the Tories passed him on as a council candidate. This then erupted in the public sphere, and lots of people said this is outrageous, particularly Luciano Berger, the MP who he targeted, and he has now subsequently stood aside. But my first question is, what universe are we living in, in which someone like that could become a council candidate? Are the Tories so desperate? It's a very good question, that it is hard to find council candidates. That's certainly true. And he has been doing a lot of little videos on Twitter that have been very funny, and so people may have thought of him in that context.

34:42He makes AI-generated satirical videos about people. I wonder, including me, as it happens. Yeah. You're Doctor Who, aren't you? I'm Doctor Who, yes. The video is very nice about me. You'd make a very good Doctor Who, by the way. I need a long scarf. I think the difficulty is that at the local level, the background checks aren't necessarily very thorough. And this would have been a matter for the local Somerset conservatives to decide. and it then becomes a big story later on. I think it raises a very interesting question about forgiveness. You and I are both Catholics and we believe in repentance and forgiveness.

35:19We believe in the sacrament of confession. At what point does forgiveness apply and at what point ought you to ask for wider forgiveness? That is to say, it seems to me that if you've done something very badly wrong. It's not enough to say, I have repented. It needs the person who was offended to say, you have repented and therefore I forgive you. And that it may be a very noble thing for that person to do to give that forgiveness, but it is not a requirement. And as I think Luciana Berger, who is a very impressive politician, a fine person, was very badly affected by this. I think it was very hard to say that he was ready to come onto the public stage, and it was there for an error to have approved him.

36:07The criminal activity took place over three months from October 2014 to January 2015. So this is about a decade ago. And in the judge's remarks in the ruling against Joshua Bonehill-Payne, the judge said, you engage in a cruel campaign of vile racist abuse on the internet against a Jewish Labour member of Parliament simply because she is Jewish. It was deliberate, unlawful harassment. I am satisfied that this was gravely oppressive, racially aggravated harassment of the worst kind intended to cause her alarm and distress. On the other hand, as you say, 10 years ago, he went to prison. He did his time.

36:43He came out, said everything I said was wrong. He apologized for it. He has done anti-extremism work. He's actually using his own experience to campaign against anti-Semitism in modern Britain. So it raises this interesting question, as you say, at what point does society accept that someone has changed and then allow them to fulfill a public role? And what can that public role be? And is it dependent upon the seriousness of the early crime? Or is all crime just something that just rules you out of future political participation? Well, the effective deputy prime minister who is running the country at the moment in the absence of the prime minister on holiday is Louise Haig is a convicted fraudster.

37:30The country is being run by a convicted fraudster. And I think that's a pretty unsatisfactory situation to be in. I think her job is, say, senior and her crime such a terrible one in terms of public trust that she should not be running the country. Whether she should be an MP is another matter, but she should not be the king's most senior minister in the country at the moment. I think repentance is very important and forgiveness is very important. But that if you do certain things, you rule yourself out from certain future activities. And that that is a consequence of what you've done. And genuine repentance probably means you understand that.

38:13Yes. Because you recognize that I repent, I regret deeply what I did, but I completely understand that Jewish people are not going to want me in public life because of that. And part of my repentance is to accept that limitation. Yes. And so I come back always to the individual. I believe in individuals building society rather than the other way around. And the truly repentant individual doesn't want to do the things that would cause upset to the people who were hurt in the first place. So you would have had a quiet word with him and said, think about it. I think he's done exactly the right thing subsequently.

38:46I think he's come to the right conclusion that he should not allow his name to go forward and he's understood why, which I think is very important. I think it should possibly never have got that far, but that his resignation, he wasn't forced to stand down, he wasn't expelled, actually is indicative of genuine repentance. And has said that he now wants to work with the Tory party on counter-extremism. And that's very important because we have a terrible, terrible problem in this country of anti-Semitism. I mean, it has been growing. We see the figures recently about the number of anti-Semitic attacks has gone up very significantly.

39:19It's a problem, been a great problem in the Labour Party. It's why Luciano Berger had to leave the Labour Party. And the Tory party has to make sure that we are utterly clear on the wrongness of anti-Semitism and don't allow anti-Semitism to grow within the party. So his work on that could be very important. I think it's a mark of character to accept your limitations and to publicly say, I understand the arguments against me and on second thoughts, I won't be proceeding. Whereas the truly mad would just persist or the truly malevolent would just persist. If his repentance were fake, I think he would have tried to persist.

39:58Yeah, I agree. Or run as an independent or something like that. Yeah, if it was all about him. But you must be able to see why some liberals in the Conservative Party are very annoyed that this man ever got approved as a council candidate, because Kemi Betenhock has said she is going to take away the right to run as an MP for people who oppose leaving the ECHR or people who support net zero. So in other words, she's discouraging liberals from running as MPs. And yet at the same time, the party permitted someone who had gone to prison for anti-Semitism to run as a council candidate. Well, the liberals have some council candidate who was done for drug trading.

40:41So I'm afraid there are councillors with criminal records and there is a Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Louise Haig, who is a convicted fraudster. So we do have this problem and the government covers it up because the information commissioner has said we're not allowed to lay the criminal records of ministers. You take the point, the critics are going to say, Kemi is trying to discourage moderates and Liberals, as the BBC defines them, from being in the Tory party, but her party appears to have given the green light to a former repentant anti-Semite. But one is standing for Parliament, one is standing for the Council.

41:12I think the two are a completely different level. I don't think she's saying no Council candidate can be in favour of net zero. But as an MP, if you're in favour of net zero and you're in favour of the European Convention on Human Rights, are you a Conservative? I think what Ken Ben-Locke's saying is if you're not a Tory, you'd better go and stand for the Lib Dems. That seems to me a perfectly reasonable position to take. on policy grounds. But I think you've got to be very, very careful about allowing people with criminal records to stand, partly because there's such a lack of trust in politics.

41:43This was your point at the beginning. Why do we get politicians who are so peculiar? And we need to have politicians who people can trust. And you rebuild that trust by people who have good reputations. What does the word candid come from? It comes from white, the pure white toga worn by the candidate to show that the candidate was spotless. And that's something we should aim to get back to, I would have thought. Not that Roman candidates were by any means spotless. I mean, they were as crooked as can be. But nonetheless, the principle was a good one. You see, I think we're all peculiar. I mean, you're definitely peculiar.

42:17I know I'm peculiar. On what basis are you peculiar? Telegraph, viewers, listeners and readers think you're the acme of normality. They do not. But if you just went through your life without ever being put under the microscope, and at the end of it, you sort of picked out the isolated bits of madness, the bad decisions, the appalling things you had said, then you could really demolish someone's character. And that's essentially what happens in politics. If someone who's just trundling along for, say, 40 years, being a human being, making all the mistakes that people make, they don't stop to think about, what have I done in the past?

42:51Does it make me, on balance, an evil, wicked, or stupid person? But as soon as they run for office, suddenly all those things are highlighted. And in the case of Joshua Bonahill-Payne, what I would have said to him is, as far as you and your friends and everyone who respects you knows, you are a former anti-Semite. But the moment you run for office, you become someone who was once an anti-Semite, and that's all we're going to talk about. We're not going to talk about the forgiveness bit. We're not going to talk about the counter-extremism bit. That's all we're going to be interested in, is what you once did.

43:21And that's the problem of running for office. Is it that it's not that politicians are all terrible? It's actually just that we look at ordinary people through the lens of politics and we spot their faults. Yes. But do you think that's unreasonable? Do I think it's unreasonable? That we want to know about our politicians. We want to know their warts and all. And sometimes people don't care. I think you have to go through – it's like running on coals. when you go into public life, you've got to run on the coals and eventually you hit grass. But some people run on the coals and the coals never stop because they're rotten all the way down.

43:51But most people, you've got to have a week or so if you enter politics of running on the coals in which everyone's going to go through your back catalogue. But eventually you hit grass and people stop caring. Like the late Alan Clarke, who when interviewed for Kensington and Chelsea was asked, are there any skeletons in your closet? He said, there are so many there bursting to get out. And everybody laughed and thought he was marvellous. And another politician who raises questions about the quality and calibre of people in public life is Wes Streeting, who it turns out has been bankrolled by a think tank linked to one of the world's most notorious fraudsters.

44:23He accepted£37 ,500 in donations from Labour for the Long Term, an exciting, exciting name, over 2022 and 2023, despite significant concerns among some senior figures in the party over the source of those funds. Just one month before LLT made its first donation, its founder accepted half a million pounds from Sam Bankman Freed. That's the disgraced American cryptocurrency billionaire who was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in jail for fraud. He is known as the Crypto King. Here is Wes Streeting explaining what he has to spend money on and how proud he is of the people who give to his party.

45:08To run a big political party in this country, if you want to be a party that governs in the United Kingdom or governs in Scotland or Wales or Northern Ireland, it all costs money. And to fund our politics, we rely on donations. And that includes me, by the way. If you go on my parliamentary register of interest, you will see the people or organisations who've donated to me. And in general terms, I think that we should welcome people giving to politics and wanting to fund democracy and participation. Because unless you've got political parties and political candidates who can set out their stall and set out their argument and compete with each other, you don't actually have democracy.

46:00Democracy. In fact, I've gone as far as to say in the past that I'm proud of the people who donate to me. I'm proud of the people who've donated to my party. And people give to causes they believe in all the time. Jacob, first of all, is politics really that expensive? Do you really need£37 ,500? Politics has expenses. Right. We run our politics on a shoestring compared to the United States. but running a political party particularly in opposition which he was at this point is expensive and front bench spokesmen for an opposition party have very little support right but i think the problem really goes back to the over-regulation of politics we never used to have an electoral commission we never used to have donor register and all this sort of stuff and then proper people gave money to parties and since we've had all this regulation people don't want to admit they're giving to parties.

46:58So we've had lots of rogues and dodgy people filling the gap. I think it's all the fault of over-regulation, pushing off people who don't want anything, just want to give money to support what they believe in. And they've moved away from doing it. Why would they give up because of regulation? They have to be announced. In England, most rich people don't want to admit that they're rich. Are you sure it's that or they don't want to admit to giving money to the Conservative Party? It's a bit of both. Or to reform. Other than the wonderful late Stuart Wheeler, who was such a great man, and gave five million pounds to the Tory party on absolute condition.

47:32He was never given any honour at all. Yes. But part of the problem here is also that West Streeting has been very critical of reforms donations. Now, of course, they're two different scenarios. I'm not saying they're exactly the same. But they both come back to the thing that the public is uncomfortable with, which is this idea of dodgy foreigners giving money to politicians. Well, money coming from people who've been found guilty of offenses. So, posh George has spent eight months in an American penitentiary, and this man's got 25 years. It goes back to our earlier conversation. Politicians need to be very, very careful about dealing with people who have criminal records.

48:10It's very unwise to do that and to take money from them. It is damaging to the whole body politic, regardless of party. It makes everyone think, you've all got your and it'll take money from anybody. This is my objection to regulation because regulation replaces judgment. If somebody can tick the boxes, they give half a million to some funny think tank. The think tank then gives money. Bingo. It's ticked all the boxes of regulation. If instead that crypto man had been able to give money directly to West Streeting, which would have been true up until about 2000, West Streeting wouldn't have taken it because you would have had to apply judgment.

48:54And if you'd accepted it, everyone would have said that's a stupid thing to do. And this is where regulation is so corrosive because it makes parties think, I've followed the rules, it must be fine. Yes. Actually, no, judgment is essential and therefore you need fewer rules and more judgment. They don't have to engage their ethical brain muscle because technically it's all come from somewhere that makes it all all right and you don't have to think about it. That's right. My final piece of evidence that I want to offer for there's something wrong with our politics is this. Hello, it is August the 5th and I'm on holiday.

49:29Please don't hate me for having a holiday, but sometimes we do have to preserve our battery to function well. This is actually the first holiday I remember having, A, enjoying and B, almost relaxing. But today's also August the 5th, which is a shit day. It's a shit day. because today is the day that the guidance which is as clear as mud comes in based off of the back of the supreme court uh judgment about um sex being that which you were born into um which all it does is dismiss the lived experience of trans people and protects nobody this new guidance protects nobody all it does is cause more division and hatred towards trans people that just want to have their life like minding their own business um and protects no cis woman um who is gender critical let's call it what it is hates trans people like because if you didn't why would you fear trans people and i just can't help but think we're living through this moment in history where people will look back and realise how rubbish politicians were, how bad we were sticking up from minority group, because we're talking about less than half percent of the population in the UK here.

50:58And I'm so ashamed. I'm so unbelievably ashamed. And I promise you, I will continue to use my platform as an MP to fight for the rights of trans people, because don't kid yourself, ladies. They're coming for you after they come for the rest of the LGBT community. They're coming for you. They're coming for us. Stop pretending this is about protecting women's rights. It's nothing of the sort. For those who cannot see, this is Samantha Niblett, who is a Labour MP, lying on her deck chair in the baking sun on holiday, ranting about the latest guidance about male and female bathrooms. Now, Jacob, putting aside the content, I can't believe that she thought that would be a good look.

51:49Sunning herself on holiday talking about trans rights. It's sort of everything that a lot of people find cringe about the left. And it raises this question of a lot of people were elected at the last election by almost by mistake. Parties didn't think they were going to enter parliament, but because of the weird result. You know, we've now got dozens of people who no one ever thought would enter politics. Same was true of the 2019 landslide. This tends to happen in landslides. But why does it feel as though we're not getting top quality, rational, intellectual people into the House of Commons?

52:25Because it's always felt like that. Right. And if we'd been having this conversation a hundred years ago, we'd be saying, why are we dealing with such hopeless people like Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald? If we'd been having it 200 years ago, we'd have been saying, that canning, he's really not up to it. It's not as good as Pitt. And I just think that is the way of the world. If we go back 100 years before that, we'd have been saying Walpole's a frightful crook. 100 years before that, we're into Buckingham and saying, oh, the king has favorites and this is frightfully annoying. 100 years before that, your Cardinal Wolsey and isn't he a bit plump.

53:03I doubt there's ever been a time when we've said, aren't we lucky? We've got wonderful politicians. They're so clever and sophisticated and honest and proper. Look at Churchill's tax affairs for heaven's sake. Unbelievable. He calls in the head of the Inland Revenue as Chancellor of Exchequer and tells him to sort out his own personal tax affairs. It's absolutely brilliant in its way. So I don't think we've had this amazing standard historically. And my bet is that politicians are as good as bad as they've ever been. And that the niblets of this world, we can't remember from 1926, 1826, 1726, and so on, because they just pass into the mists of time.

53:44We remember the big figures. And by remembering the big figures, we remember the people who were impressive, not the ones who were useless. So we have a very false vision of the past of a succession of great men and that's now come to an end in a hundred years time people will look back at this period and they won't remember keir starmer they may remember kenny baynock see what happens that's interesting politics to me seems to be divided between rogues and psychopaths um and the rogues are people who just not saying which one you are but the rogues are the people who just do whatever they're going to do and they don't care how they're covered.

54:21But to me, equally dangerous are the psychopaths who slip under the radar. These are people who, from when they were a child, have thought, someday I'm going to be prime minister, so I've got to be very careful about what I say and do. They've never faked a CV. They've never got drunk while at university. They never smoked a spliff or anything like that. And they then enter the house a few decades later with this spotless background which we in the press, we go through their bins, we go through their diaries, and we try and find something that We can't. And I actually find those people scarier than the Jason R.

54:50Days of the world because those are the people who've been plotting since day one. I'm intrigued by this. I think most politicians fall into it slightly by accident. They bumble into it rather than the way I did. Well, Jacob, you'll be returning on Monday. I hope you've not been too insulted by me. Dividing politicians between rogues and psychopaths. You're neither of those, but you're the exception that proves the rule. Of course, I hasten to it. But I'm intrigued when you enter politics, which will you be? No, no, no, I wouldn't I'm one of the few people who'd be doing it for entirely selfless reasons Public service I just do it because my country is crying out for leadership But you'll be back on Monday And tomorrow there will be a Royal Daily Tea

55:45Thank you.