Jason Arday: The hard truths we can't ignore

0:03The Telegraph.

0:08Professor Jason Arday's closest academic colleagues claim that he was hounded to death by the media. How much self-reflection is required of Tim and I and our fellow journalists and how much responsibility must Cambridge take? I have not commented over the weekend because it's not about me and I wanted to think and wait before saying something. What I did do was go to confession because when I heard the news, I felt very bad about it and ashamed of some of the things that I had said. Looking back on what I said about Jason Arday in the last couple of weeks, I think our newspaper just reported.

0:54But I'm not just a reporter, I'm a commentator. And I can't deny that I told jokes. I was cruel. I didn't think about the human being himself. You did say we do need to be very careful here because there's a vulnerable human being a part of it. And you did actually approach it in quite a, if I can use the word, Christian manner. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tominey.

1:29Tim, I had a very strange night on Friday because I went to see Oliver at the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue and it kept on being plagued by the alert. Oh, yes. Even if people silenced their phones, it still rang out and initially we thought, are there some kids playing with some kind of Simon Says of 2026 behind us? And then it soon emerged that people who had been switching on and off from airplane mode had basically sounded this alert. And Fagin had to make a joke about it in the middle of Oliver and actually did it quite well and said Oliver being woken up by an alarm. So I didn't have my phone out on throughout the whole of the theatrical performance.

2:08I left to a missed call from you and the news broke that Jason Arday had died. And you and I had a chat about it while I was under the bright lights of the big city. And of course, my initial reaction was one of great sorrow. And it then quickly turned to a degree of self-reflection. Have we covered this story correctly? Have we been fair and proportionate in our approach? Are we in some way to blame? which is feelings that you can have about such stories that the media had to do precisely the same after Caroline Flack took her own life. And we don't yet know precisely what has happened, but the police are saying that they are not treating his death as suspicious.

2:50And even before coming into the studio, we've been debating, shall we discuss this? Because you then feel that those who have accused the media of a so-called feeding frenzy, that we're just continuing to feed on the story. But I think as we spoke about him in life, then it's only right that we should speak about him in death and address some of the criticisms of the media coverage of this. And let's be honest, The Telegraph did do an entire investigation. We weren't the only ones to cover this story. The Times Higher Educational Supplement covered it. The Guardian covered it. Independent journalists covered it.

3:29The whole media covered this. Well, Lord Woolley, the principal of Homerton College in Cambridge, said that the 41-year-old academic had been subjected to, quote, the most horrendous, toxic, vicious witch hunt, and that he felt hounded to death. So I have not commented over the weekend because it's not about me, and I wanted to think and wait before saying something. what I did do was go to confession because when I heard the news I felt very bad about it and ashamed of some of the things that I had said and going to confession for me is partly a means of trying to figure out how I feel what I've really done and what is my responsibility and in that conversation with the priest I don't want to give too much of it away he very wisely said you can't apologize for what you're not responsible for and in a way that's narcissistic right you're not directly responsible for someone taking their own life you're not responsible for the things that went wrong in his life such as the stories and the exaggerations or the college appointing him or perhaps failing to support him.

4:52So if you feel bad, and feeling bad is a good thing, it's like an emergency alarm going off in your conscience. It's your mind telling you something's not right. It's like physical pain tells you there's something wrong with you. A feeling of guilt tells you you should be doing something you're not or you're doing something you shouldn't. So you have to figure out precisely what is it I have done and take ownership of it and then fix that. So looking back on what I said about Jason Arday in the last couple of weeks, I think our newspaper just reported, but I'm not just a reporter, I'm a commentator.

5:33And I can't deny that I told jokes. I was cruel. I didn't think about the human being himself. Well, you did actually, because you did say on that, just to stop you for a second, you did say on this podcast while I was on holiday and I was listening to it, you did say, we do need to be very careful here because there's a vulnerable human being at the heart of it. And you did actually approach it in quite a, if I can use the word, Christian manner. Well, and one thing I regret is not following my instincts because I also said privately, editorially, we need to be very careful about this man. It wasn't a racist story, but it was inevitably a racial story because had he been black and an academic at Aberystwyth, it wouldn't have received so much coverage.

6:17Had he been white and an academic at Cambridge, it wouldn't have received so much coverage. But because he was presented to us almost like a mascot of people of colour achieving at Cambridge, that's why it became a referendum in people's minds on DEI. And in retrospect, even though that is a legitimate thing to be angry about, it wasn't fair that one individual ended up carrying the burden for all of people like me wanting to see that system ridiculed and changed. So the thing that I concluded at the end of my confession I had done wrong was to forget the human being. And the pledge that I have made as part of my reparation is to try in future to remember the person.

7:08And I genuinely, by the way, think that sarcasm, satire and irony serve a social purpose. Of course. They puncture ridiculous people and they bring people down to earth. That is what one seeks to do. And I'm trying to work out what I'm personally responsible for. And I will try not to repeat that in future. I think there is a difference between legitimate, balanced coverage with or without using humour and sort of cruel and malicious invective, often published with impunity on social media. I reflected on it, not with a priest, but with my husband, who is always my litmus test, and said, listen, I feel bad.

7:49I'm a member of the media. We covered this extensively on The Telegraph. We did discuss it on the podcast. Have I said unpleasant things about Professor Arde? I was sad because, of course, the human being transcends the story, and I had fond memories that I expressed on here. I know this guy has done wrong, but when I met him at question time, he was extremely sweet towards me and my daughter and that's not often the backstage experience. And this guy was smiley and energetic and showed some support for my daughter who's quite academic and might make an application to his or another esteemed university in due course.

8:27And therefore I left with kind of a fond feeling about him. And I left in awe of the fact that he had suggested that he was a non-verbal and had achieved huge success in academia nonetheless. The truth of the matter, as I expressed to my husband, is as follows. If the media had not exposed the inconsistencies in his CV and other matters, he would probably still be alive today. But if there hadn't have been inconsistencies in his CV and other matters, the media wouldn't have had anything to expose. Yes. It's a perfectly legitimate line of journalistic inquiry to probe somebody who has been put up as the poster boy for diversity at Cambridge, being promoted before his time, actually kind of broken records, both self-appointed and thrust upon him.

9:18and who has garnered a huge amount of publicity, it's perfectly legitimate to probe whether that person's claims stand up to scrutiny and would expect that of anyone. What we need to be asking ourselves is, was there a feeding frenzy? And what I would always call for is consistency. I am extremely critical of high-profile figures in my column. I'm not particularly pleasant about figures on the left and more recently, the right. But I do kind of deplore cancel culture. And you and I were on the same page on this. If you don't want people to be cancelled on the right, you shouldn't then advocate them being cancelled on the left.

10:01I looked at the whole saga and said, does this really need to be the end of this guy's career? In the same way that you might say the same about the plagiarism scandal that affected the journalist Johan Hari. In the same way that you might say David Starkey, an esteemed academic, a historian whose quote was taken out of context, and he literally lost everything. Be consistent, left and right, because why wasn't it a feeding frenzy on Starkey? Why weren't people who basically turned a blind eye to his suffering, why are they any better than anyone that's currently being criticised for having a hand, supposedly, in our day's death?

10:44Having been excoriating about myself, I will defend myself. And I did say at the time, he will be going through hell, which is why I said people need to be careful. That concern was never shown to my friend David Starkey. No, nobody cared about him. Who went through exactly the same experience. He had all of his honours and his positions taken away from him. He literally, as he said to me quite recently, I lost everything. He did, yes. And people later who did not support him publicly or privately have only more recently sort of said, listen, you were caught up in the madness of 2020. And actually now, in retrospect, I think you were treated too harshly.

11:25That's no good six years on. Yes. And actually, in the case of Starkey, in the case of Arde, the institutions that abandon these people, the institutions that suddenly drop them like a stone, what responsibility do they have to bear over the well-being of the person that they once celebrated? There is a parallel here. Starkey, the historian, he's the king of Cambridge. I know he's not a black young professor, but his name was in lights. Cambridge cashed in on Starkey's fame. He was the world's foremost expert on the Tudors. And oh, my goodness, didn't Cambridge love the cachet of that? How many very talented students have ended up at Cambridge studying history because of Professor Starkey?

12:07Similarly with our day, you put them up on a pedestal. If you're going to cash in that much on that person's celebrity and then they fall off that pedestal, if you aren't there to catch them, who on earth is? Yes. And I'm not applying this, by the way, to Lord Woolley, who is the head of that college, because he says he felt hounded to death his words and he couldn't see a way out. Diane said to him, she held his hand and said, we will help you to get through this. But on that day, we saw a man half his body weight and desperate beyond belief. now Lord Willie is pointing the finger at the media and I'm sure there are going to be the inevitable calls from hacked off types and others about Elevison 2.0 okay let's just await those calls and I'm not at all suggesting this of Lord Willie clearly on a personal level he and his wife reached out to Professor Arde and and thank goodness they they did that where was everyone else at Cambridge because typically let's use Hugh Edwards as an example different I mean Hugh Edwards actually convicted of extremely serious crimes a process kicks in whereby lawyers or representatives on behalf of Edwards say listen the headlines have broken this man has been suspended from his job he is now in a very vulnerable condition can we just advise all media cease and desist, know his wife doesn't want to give a comment on or off the record, leave us alone.

13:40And it's either said on the record or off the record, he is suffering from severe mental health problems. Everyone lay off. I don't know why that process didn't kick in in this case. It was hinted at. The Cambridge authorities, as far as I'm aware, didn't issue such statements either on or off the record to the country's media. Well, instead they lent into it's racist to criticise him. And the problem with that defence is we were finding demonstrable proof that he had misled people. And so it wasn't racist and the defence wasn't good enough. And there is a question of duty of care here. I mean, I come back to my criticisms of Cambridge.

14:20I've been a student at Cambridge. I've suffered with my mental health at Cambridge. And that was 20 years ago. I hope it has improved. But part of the problem with the institution is it's a place where academics manage academics. And academics are not very good at that. I mean, some academics are, again, this may have changed, forgive me if I'm out of touch, but back when I was teaching, I received no training in teaching. You get none. What? You don't get any training to supervise. No one teaches you how to do it. It's just assumed that because you're a very clever person, you can just go into a classroom and do it.

14:55As I say, that may have changed. To go back to the point about David Starkey, I would never say to David, who infamously referred to black people as damned blacks, he was talking about if there had been a genocide of black people, there wouldn't be so many damned blacks in Europe today. I would never say to David personally, yeah, you were misrepresented there. Yeah. Or that was the right terminology. Well done, David. No, no, it wasn't. Because it was the wrong thing to say. It doesn't matter to me, though. There is, see, this is all about, this is what our society and what crowds don't do, which is the operation of moral discernment and personal responsibility.

15:40Morally, what he did was wrong. What is my personal responsibility? behind the scenes, it is to be kind and to be there for him. And that applies to people who've done actually really bad things, including prisoners. People don't abandon people. And one reason why they don't abandon them is because if you do abandon them, which is what often happens in a cancellation, they have nowhere else to go. And that is when people start to consider doing very, very dark things.

16:22Now, on your point about the behavior of the media, what people have to understand about journalism is journalism operates within ethical parameters. And we are trained on that, by the way, and we have to do courses on that. It is rammed home all the time. Our reporting has to be proportionate and we have to respect people's privacy insofar as something is of public interest, right? But at the same time, the media is something like a force of nature. It is like a river that breaks its dam and floods everything. To some extent, it's almost dispassionate because it's just about telling the truth.

16:58And if it is presented to us that someone did something wrong, However good or decent or sweet or kind that person is We just have a responsibility we can't ignore to report it And we will report it And by the way, to continue that metaphor of being like a flood Some people try and ride that water Politicians come to us all the time and say, please promote me And then when they screw up or they steal some money Or they're sleeping with someone behind their wife's back and we report it, they say, why is the media doing this to me? Sure. This is a witch hunt. No, you have used us and we have reported on you.

17:41Yes. That's the way it works. You've got to take the rough with the smooth. This is the argument against Prince Harry. You know, infamy, infamy. They've all got an infamy. You've attracted the publicity. Yes. You have tried to present the public with your truth. Don't be surprised then when people claim their own right of reply to your truth and share their own truth. And in the case of Jason Arday, the media was used to promote him. Yes. For heaven's sake, he guest presented the Today programme. Yes. So again, there is Cambridge wishing to use the media, to open the door, to open, pull back the curtains and say, look in, and then to suddenly say, no, you can't look now.

18:21This is not right. I would just make one point on this, which does get problematic for the media. And this is when people are in the depths of reputational despair. And I'd cite an example like the former Duke of York, no longer called Prince Andrew. Yes, yes. It should be reiterated that Andrew has never been found guilty in a court of law of anything. Correct. But he got found guilty in the court of public opinion for grotesque errors of judgment. And he was found caught along with Fergie in a lie. I cut off contact with Epstein after he was convicted. Oh, no, you didn't. In fact, you did the opposite.

18:59You sent emails, gushing emails, sucking up to the guy and continuing to cash in on his billionaire status. But because the reputation has been so destroyed by that point, it does sometimes lead to a feeding frenzy because the media can get away with more and more of a pile on because there is no reputation left to fame. But again, I don't remember anybody expressing any concern. And again, I know it's different. Because what Andrew and indeed Hugh Edwards are accused of, in one case convicted, in one case not, are very, very serious crimes. That is not what Arday was accused of, OK? Arday wasn't accused of anything criminal.

19:45I need to make that point. But I'm merely saying that I'm not comfortable with the inconsistency and actual hypocrisy of people denouncing one kind of feeding frenzy, but not another, simply because they either agree or disagree. There aren't that many people on the left expressing sympathy for Nigel Farage. I don't think Jason Hardy really did that much that wrong. It was wrong, but I don't think it really mattered in the way that some people felt it mattered. and I again I did say that at the time but I laughed at it because I found it all preposterous if Prince Andrew died that would not exonerate him of his crimes yes and I bet no one would say that it did and I bet that no one would be calling for inquiries into the press now you can look over past podcasts in which we've discussed the accusations against Prince Andrew and you can find examples of us saying, I do hope someone is with him right now.

20:40I do hope someone cares for him. Likewise, Charles Moore has written columns making precisely your point about how he has not been found guilty. You will find in the media generally people who are willing to take risks like Charles and stand up for what they see as due process. Yes. Well, apparently if you stand up for due process you are a stooge this is the other problem so in a way the public doesn't want proportionality no the public gets someone in their sights and they expect you to bring them down well if you don't bring them down you're accused of being conspiring with them but this process and look i do think under work we went through something like not on the scale or the violence but something like the stalinist purges it was like a cultural revolution yeah in which innocent and guilty people were swept up and treated in a way that was totally abominable and inhuman.

21:35Also on that, don't forget a lot of the academics that were cancelled simply over COVID. Don't forget that. We had esteemed scientists and doctors who didn't go along with lockdown, who expressed perfectly cogent views along with the Barrington Declaration that actually just have focused lockdown. I'm just making this point. And these experts were cancelled by people with no scientific or medical knowledge whatsoever, Tim. That's how bad it got. Yes. And one thing that also makes one suspicious of it is the partisanship of it. People do not take seriously, it seems to me, the threats to Nigel Farage's life.

22:14A comedian has joked about throwing acid at him. Yes. And their career, Joe Brand, does not seem to have been cancelled. Anne Whittacombe was recently murdered in the most brutal way. And I don't feel that it has received the same scope of coverage with the same emotional tone as is rightly applied to left-wing figures who have been killed. Yes, like Joe Cox. I agree. And I don't understand why. And again, that is another reason, not an excuse, but another reason why some people took pleasure in the downfall of Jason R. Day, because they were sick of these sorts of double standards. And what they felt was, you have promoted this man at the same time as over here is a school, the Michaela Academy, which without using positive discrimination, without mythologizing its students, but with the application of boring old fashioned techniques like discipline and hard work is achieving everything.

23:25Yes. that Cambridge was claiming Jason Arday was accomplishing. And those students were genuinely achieving it all. Yes. And hope to go to Cambridge. And we did make that point. If you hope to go to Cambridge, you hope to be being taught by professors whose CVs stand up to scrutiny and whose academic research is foolproof. Yes. Now, I do understand why institutions wish to promote and to publicise people like Jason Arday. It's about saying to young black kids, you could do this too. Because part of the problem with higher education or with politics or with journalism, if people don't see someone like them doing a job, they think that's not for me and they don't apply for it.

24:13And having taught at universities, I can tell you that surprisingly often, partly because secondary schools are so bad, you do get kids who can't read and write good but you can tell they have an excellent mind yes and so sometimes you do go i mean obviously you have to ultimately mark on the basis of what's in front of you but you might say i'm going to push and i'm going to encourage this child in particular and i'm going to speak to my colleagues about them because that person has been let down by their background but with extra help i really believe they could be very talented yes and jason And our day strikes me as one of those sorts of people who other people looked at and thought, he's got all these problems, but I can see something in him.

24:59So it's very sad that that kind of person has been brought down, that that story has finished that way, because I really hope it doesn't put institutions off trying to encourage people from non-typical backgrounds to go into higher education. And I hope that racists don't jump on this as evidence that the whole thing is a giant con job and a conspiracy against white people. Because it's not. It is not a conspiracy. This story has been an appalling tragedy. We've received a really insightful email from a regular listener called Alan Newland, who once sent me the Bible that he wrote on teaching.

25:39He's a former teacher and he's an authority on teaching. and it just picks up on your point about academics being in charge of academics and whether that's always the right approach. The tragedy of Jason Arday has a profound lesson for all teachers and it is to do with the fundamental reason why education and teaching exist, which is to seek truth in the pursuit of knowledge. The people who supported Arday promoted him as an icon and a trophy to their particular ideology about education and society. When exposed by journalists that he was not worthy of that, his life was bereft of any meaning.

26:12Now those same people who still include teachers and professors will use him as their ideological martyr. The real tragedy of this affair is that two young children are now left without a father. The real scandal of this affair is not that Jason Arday was wearing the emperor's new clothes, but that the very pinnacle of the British education elite has actually been doing so and proved itself to be unworthy of the fundamental ethic of their profession. we have sir simon baron cohen who's a close friend of the late academic saying it's important to see what should be learned from his appointment he's uh linked because he's the director of the autism research center so he wants an investigation he wants lessons to be learned when you're talking about what's in the public interest when you've got public bodies like universities and arguably the media, political institutions, whatever, when we have investigations, it's all about how we can improve them.

27:11He also confirmed that the professor's mental health had been left in quotes tatters, adding that there were questions about whether the media failed in its duty of care towards him as a vulnerable person with disabilities. Well, possibly, but it's also surely Cambridge that has a duty of care towards any of their employees, former or current. And currently there is a GoFundMe campaign that has reached£150 ,000 and there's going to be a vigil held in Trafalgar Square. But again, with regard to rewriting history, we now have Stand Up to Racism and other campaigners, as you said earlier, trying to make this a case.

27:57just as you say we don't want racists jumping on it saying everyone white is discriminated against and black people are being over promoted and blah blah blah we also don't want anti-racism campaigners to say that this is all a result of evil white people do we i think people need to be honest so i will be and i hope people will feel that i have been honest on how i feel about what i said during this story but let's also be honest about what it means to be a human being people keep screaming be kind people are not kind and lots of people who say be kind are very unkind yeah and there are lots of examples of people on social media right now who are saying the problem was a lack of kindness around jason our day and you can find immediate evidence as night follows day of them being desperately unkind about ann widdekombe or nigel farage people have also said cliched things like, as I have said, remember he was human.

28:55And when you say remember someone's human, you're saying remember they're vulnerable, but also remember they have faults. To be human is not just to suffer. To be human is also to cause other people harm. I'm not saying he did. I'm saying that we must be aware of what damage we can do and be honest about the fact that we do damage. All of us, because we're human, because we're fallen, that is in our nature. We try and be better. But let's not, for heaven's sake, turn what is allegedly a witch hunt into another witch hunt against another group of people, because that is like a Grecian tragic cycle of vengeance.

29:40Stop that. Focus on what went wrong, yes, and fix the institutional problems that we can fix. But you'll never change human nature. You'll never stop people exaggerating things about themselves. You'll never stop people judging each other. You'll never stop gossip. And actually, any society that did attempt to stop those things would become totalitarian and hypocritical. We'll be back tomorrow, 5pm. If you've been affected by any of the issues we've discussed on today's Daily Tea, you can contact the Samaritans on 116 123. Thank you.