Reform at war: Is Zia Yusuf out of control?

0:02The Telegraph.

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0:54How does Nigel Farage solve a problem like Zia Yusuf? And why does Reform's Home Affairs spokesman hate Conservatives so much when he used to be one? Cambridge University in crisis. The Vice-Chancellor is under pressure to resign. And the Jason Arde scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Camilla Tomini. And me, Jacob Rees-Mogg.

1:24it's funny isn't it discussing kind of the patriarchal nature of a university like cambridge and how you would expect fusty old don smoking pipes to restore order and then who is that person in reform it is nigel farage isn't he he was increasingly sort of playing this slightly I call it Papa Smurf role. He's quite fatherly, isn't he? This kind of like, now come on, hang on a minute, everybody calm down. And I'm talking specifically in relation to the kind of, the runaway child of the scene that is Zia Yusuf. And I'm referring to him in those terms because comparatively he is quite young in the organisation.

2:02Also he's quite pint-sized. And there is something slightly rebellious teenage about this bloke, isn't there? It's very interesting. Nigel's put down is very funny it reminds me of a line from P.G. Woodhouse about the danger of speaking to somebody like a Dutch uncle because they may speak back to you like a Dutch aunt and I think with Zia Yusuf you may well get the Dutch aunt's response It's a slap down you read it because this is about Zia Yusuf going on X yesterday as is his one I saw him in the morning he's at a press conference he's being perfectly reasonable he's a very good media performer he's answering the Q &A with Nigel alongside him the next thing And he does have this propensity to just go on social media and completely lose it.

2:45Ben Wallace questions their prisons programme, which we discussed yesterday. He then launches into this unprecedented attack on the former defence secretary, basically calling him a traitor. They have this to and fro or what do you know about anything? And he's basically said to Ben Wallace, well, you let in all of these undocumented Afghans in after the fall of Kabul. So it's all your fault and you tried to keep it silent with an NDA or whatever it was that they restricted the reporting of. So there's all of this to and fro. And of course, then, of course, Grandpa Nigel has to step in. He's come forth and has spoken forcefully.

3:18He says Zia Yusuf was wrong to brand former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, a traitor to Britain, and said, this is too strong language. I shall give him a ticking off. I'll speak to him today, but it's over the top. So the wing commander has come out and is dressing down the troops for bad behaviour and they should have been preparing their flight. It's wonderfully old fashioned. It is the epitome of the 1960s public school, which is, I think, of course, where Nigel grew up, that the head boy is going to tick off a junior underling who ought to know better enough block than to take on his elders.

3:51What is it about right wing parties and this kind of, as you say, slightly aping of public school hierarchy? That's quite right. Although Nigel Farage, being the disciplinarian, doesn't quite sit right. I mean, I think he was probably one of the tearaways of the classroom back in the day. I should think he was one of the cool brigade rather than one of those. Oh, you think he was in the cool gang? No, I don't think he was in the cool gang. No. He may just be cool by my standards, which is a relatively low bar. Were you anywhere near the cool gang back in Newton? No, no. Not even on the, didn't you know one cool person?

4:27Oh, I may have known them, of course, but I wasn't in the... Well, what group were you in? Oh, goodness, heaven only knows. Probably a group of one. A group of one. As my father says, the best committee is a committee of one. Actually, I don't think Nigel Farage was ever in the Cool Gang. And I've got a theory about him. I think he's always been an outsider. I think that when he was at Dulwich and he was walking around in Tweed, age 12, going on about, you know, how great Churchill was. Funny enough, not. Odds fish. It's you and Ben Fogle. That's about it, right? And then he's kind of rejected by his peers for being a bit out there.

5:07Then he gets into the city, but he's not quite public school enough. So he's an outsider there. Then he gets into the Conservative Party and you're all quite snobby. And you turn around and say, oh, you're a bit of a rough diamond. I don't know if we want people who were in the city wearing pinstripe suits coming into our organisation. Then you reject him, so he's on the outside there. I think he spent his life with a degree of imposter syndrome, which is why he does all of this two fingers up to the establishment, because he feels that the establishment rejected him. And then the ultimate rejection, of course, he gives up everything for the ultimate public schoolboy, Boris Johnson.

5:46He wants to be in his cool gang, and then Boris Johnson dumps on him after 2019. And that's why you're in trouble. And what you should have done, and I mean you personally, you should have been tasked with being the head boy, being the top prefect who took this errant student on. You should have said, Nigel, after the election, come and have a peerage, buddy. Come back to us. I didn't have the authority to do that. But you would have been the perfect person to do it. Nigel and I have always got on. I think very highly of Nigel. And I'm interested in this disagreement between Nigel and Zay Yusuf because I actually like Zay Yusuf.

6:21I think he's a highly intelligent man, interesting man to talk to, thoughtful man, very, very ambitious. And that, I think, is where Nigel and Zia are going to find their relationship difficult because it seems to me Zia ultimately wants Nigel's job. Well, so does Robert Jenrick, which is also problematic, right? Robert isn't going to get it because reform don't trust defectors. Being a defector is always a mugs game because the party you left dislikes you and the party you joined doesn't trust you. and Robert is in that position. It's very hard for him to get it. Zier is clearly the front runner if anything would happen to Nigel or if all this talk about Nigel not being as good as he was, having taken his finger off the pulse.

7:03There's been a lot of recent criticism of Nigel and he's just dipped below Labour in a YouGov poll. Yes. And Zier is waiting in the wings. What about Richard Tice, by the way? Well, Richard would be an obvious candidate. He did it before. He's highly civilised. he may perhaps be too close to the Conservatives. Oh. I mean, it just seems to me that Richard should never have left the Conservative Party. Probably not. But should any of them? I mean, this is the irony, right? Zia is suffering from TDS. It's not Trump derangement syndrome, although he wants to be the next Trump. It's Tory derangement syndrome.

7:40What's wrong with... You were once a Conservative. It's a unique brand of self-loathing, isn't it? We have the same, and we'll get onto them in a minute, with like Rupert Lowe and Restore. These people fighting for ideological purity against their own type of people. Oh, you're not right wing enough. Therefore, you must be rejected. It's very odd. You know, this is a problem. And Fraser Nelson's talked about it in his substack today. The problem for Farage, and he said at the press conference yesterday when asked, would you do a deal with Restore? Well, no, actually, Lowe is surrounding himself with deeply unsavory people.

8:14I'm the one who saw off the BNP back in the day. We don't want to go back into that arena. Thank you very much. And Youssef is constantly tagging him further rightwards, particularly on social media. So where Nigel Farage draws the line on mass deportation and ice vans, Youssef seems perfectly comfortable with it. Now, it could be that somebody in that party just needs to throw some red meat to keep the further writers happy. But I think it's placing Farage in a precarious position because Farage needs Waitrose women. He's got all of the people he needs on the right. He needs to convince some sort of blue wallers to come over, as well as labour rights.

8:50And he can't do that if he's going around sort of suggesting, you know, that millions of people need to be ejected from their homes in the UK. And don't know whether the king counts as being British or not. Well, I mean, that's obviously a low suggestion, not a Yusuf one. Indeed, indeed. Yusuf hasn't been that idiotic. I think you're absolutely right. I think there is a limit to where the right should ever want to go. I do not think the Conservatives would be well advised to do a deal with Restore because of Charlie Downs, because of the statements that are being tweeted out in Rupert Lowe's name, but not, I think, by Rupert himself.

9:27Just to explain, Downs is Lowe's right-hand man. There's a lot of suggestions about kind of anti-Semitic. I mean, here's the irony. Restore exists on the basis of this very kind of anti-Islamic platform and then starts aping extremist Islamists who are anti-Jewish with their own anti-Semitic rhetoric. Square that circle. There's like a little Venn diagram going on, and I experienced it because I had a bit of a row with Lowe at the spectator party, about his refusal to come onto this podcast. And he's constantly saying he wants to be live and unedited on GB News. You did the interview with him.

10:05It's quite hard to have him live and unedited on account of him often making highly defamatory remarks. That was the problem. I mean, I wanted all his words put out, but there was a legal risk of some things he said about Nigel Farage. and the broadcaster is responsible in a libel action. But then he likes to perpetuate this Tommy Robinson-esque kind of shtick that if you edit anything, you're part of a media conspiracy rather than trying to protect yourself as an organisation from being sued with Carter Ruck's help. So I had a bit of a row and I want him to come on the Daily Tee. A bit of a row is a bit of an understatement, isn't it?

10:42I think the language was the sort of thing that I would be pressing the bleep button if we had one. Well, it was like, you're a disgrace, no, you're a disgrace. I just said to him, look, what's happened to you? Gordon Rayner, our colleague on The Telegraph, had written a very well-resourced piece about actual neo-Nazi white supremacists pouring money into Restore and supporting it. And I said, hang on a minute, Rupert, you know, this isn't really you. What are you doing? Why are you incubating these people? Oh, it's just a few rotten eggs. And then I said, and also it's not. But he's not getting rid of them though, is he?

11:16No. And also his defence is always, and I made this point and it got captured, it got taken out of context by Lawrence Fox, another grotesque hypocrite who complains about cancel culture and then wants to cancel anyone that thinks he's an idiot, which is literally 99 % of the population, but whatever. And I said, also, Rupert, you can't come out with this thing that if we say, oh God, you've got some racists in your midst, your one response to that can't be, but what about the rape gangs? you're ignoring our rape gang report. I was like, well, if it weren't for journalists, you wouldn't know anything about the rape gangs.

11:50I mean, you've joined this bandwagon pretty late, actually. Andrew Norfolk and other Labour female MPs were talking about this 20 years ago when I first started on the Sunday Express. So, God, a bit late to the party there, but whatever. So that's not an excuse. You know, what are you going to do about these wrong-uns who are supporting your party? No response. No, he seems not to be willing to do anything about it. possibly that he takes the view that beggars can't be choosers, that there are very few people who seem to be supporting Restore and therefore he doesn't want to turn anyone away. Sorry, I was just going to say the Venn diagram.

12:21You've got hard writers that want anyone who isn't white to be deported. That's a circle. You've got incels. That's another circle. You've got desperate blokes, keyboard warriors, desperate to be retweeted by Elon Musk. That's another little circle. You've got the whole kind of anti-Islamic tribe. And then at the centre of it is Restore. All of these groups are joined by this thing. They hate women, these people. I mean, Alexandra Phillips has done a whole piece for us saying, you know, she criticised Restore. The next thing, she's got a load of weird blokes hurling personal abuse at her about her appearance.

12:59And having said they've got small amounts of support, they did remarkably well in the Manchester mayoral violation, where they got 9%. They've almost doubled the Tory vote. So there is a market for them, but I think their market would be much bigger and very similar to reforms if they got rid of the ethno-nationalists, the white supremacists, the anti-Semites, and showed that they were a party that was within the bounds of political discussion rather than going off into extremist fantasy land. But back to reform then. How does Faraj sort a problem like Yusuf? He's got to win his by-election, which is on Thursday.

13:39Once he's got that out of the way, assuming he does, he needs to reassert his authority and they need to operate by collective responsibility. He has done this before. Do you remember he had a go at something that Jenrick said? Yes. Now they're besties, apparently. Of course. Which, by the way, they're not. Of course they're not, no. But you can't have your senior team contradicting each other in public. you need to have collective responsibility. It doesn't matter what we say as long as we all say the same. It's the essence of how party leaderships have to work. And Nigel needs to enforce that.

14:16And I think there is a lot of ill feeling within reform around the various camps that are looking to succeed Nigel. Yes. Tim Montgomery, once a Tory, used to run Conservative Home, now a reformer, was one of those to criticise Youssef in public. commenting on the spat on X he said use of language isn't acceptable I don't agree with Ben Wallace on this issue but Zia's language and attitude towards any opponent is inappropriate and counterproductive opponents are opponents they aren't enemies or morons one of the biggest question marks over Nigel Farage's leadership is whether he brings Zia under control I mean that's quite brave I mean that's not that's not going to win old Monty any bloody plaudits within the party but this isn't the first time that people within reform have raised concerns about Yusuf's behaviour.

15:08Tim Montgomery is a proper person in my view. He says what he thinks about things. He's very considered and he's not afraid so he won't be sitting there worrying Nigel won't like this. He'll be saying this is the right thing to say. I think he's got a great deal of integrity so I'm not surprised that he's willing to speak out. Reform has to be very careful because it's constantly arguing for freedom of speech. But then when anyone's rude about reform, it says it's stirring up hatred and that's very dangerous because particularly of what happened to Anne Whittacombe. It can't say any criticism of us is stirring up hatred and then start calling people traitors.

15:50Well, that's Wallace's point. I mean, he was on Times Radio and he said, Anne Whittacombe was murdered in what could be a political attack and that's under investigation, obviously. And Reform were telling everyone about being careful with their language and I totally agree with that. But when you start calling people traitors, it is a very heavy connotation. And he's also, of course, mindful of the fact that he's probably already got a slight target on his head because he served in the British military. I think he was mentioned in dispatches for his service in Northern Ireland. You know, that's going to put you under the radar of some pretty difficult people.

16:22And he's a former defence secretary. I mean, you can't have one rule for one and another for others. My rule on political abuse is that it doesn't usually work, that people don't believe you if you use excessive language. Ben Wallace is clearly not a traitor. No, he served queen and country at the time. He did, and he was a minister for a long time. This isn't to make him out to be a living saint. None of us is that. but Keir Starmer isn't a traitor. He wasn't a very effective prime minister. As soon as you start attacking your opponents in hysterical language, you undermine your own standing.

17:04You look foolish and you look as if you can't control yourself. Politicians need to have self-control. You don't want a home secretary, which is what Zia hopes to be, who has no self-control. It's not a role that you can carry out properly if you have no self-control. And this type of language indicates a lack of reserve and self-control. Attacks on opponents are best made if they are factual rather than being abusive. They can be moderately abusive. The Rab Butler approach, he's the best prime minister we've got. Things like that are very funny and very effective and get repeated and very British.

17:44Saying he's a liar and a traitor and a general hellhound. Enemy of the people. People just pass over their head. They don't care about that. Do you know what I think's really going on here? This is all a row internally with reform, ultimately about whether they'll do a deal with the Tories. I think Farage is positioning himself away from Lowe because if he did a deal with Lowe, he couldn't do a deal with the Tories. Now, I'm still saying that reform is the power player in all this. Kemi Badenok isn't. it's not going to be for kemi badenock to say well we've got the most seats so can somebody do a deal with us i still think it's going to be farage saying we've got the most seats but we haven't got enough for a super majority that we need to push through the legislation which you agree with on the echr net zero and other matters so farage is being actually politically sensible which of these two rumps do we want to be working with it's either the blues or it's whatever color restore are, and actually because Restore are so kind of, you know, unproven, controversial, Farage knows that statistically speaking, he needs however many Tories he can get, probably now with the statistics as they are in the polls, to form a majority.

19:02Therefore, he's on that side of the camp, whereas the likes of the Yousefs of this world in reform, who viscerally hate conservatives. I mean, hate them. It's a form of self-loathing, but it's also just they detest the likes of Jenrick and Braverman and everyone else. I know they're pretending they don't, but they probably hate you a little bit, by the way. Well, Jenrick also now hates the Tories. So I think you've got a very interesting division in reform on exactly the lines you're setting out, and that Nigel is the most practical, realistic politician. He recognises how the world works politically, and therefore has stopped saying aggressive things about the Tories.

19:41That's encouraging others to be more aggressive about the Tories, try and trap him into it. Well, the first rule of politics is learn how to count. You're going to take a deal with the Tories on 20-ish percent than restore nationally right now on what? If Farage is to be believed when he said yesterday at the press conference, I don't think there'll be a general election this year, but I do think there'll be one next year. That's how he's counting his chickens, right? I think that's right. I think Nigel is an abler politician. That's why he is leader of reform. That's how he managed to get the party to the level of support it had at the last general election.

20:18That's how he managed to make UKIP work and the Brexit party work. He is a very sophisticated, capable politician. The others are not as good at the business of politics. They may be good at business. They may be good at other things. but the sheer business of understanding politics, what voters think, having the finger on the pulse of voters, Nigel is head and shoulders above most current political actors. And that puts him in a very strong and interesting position, working out what reform strategy should be. And I think you're right that he looks at the opinion polls and he thinks, well, there may be a post-election deal with the conservatives.

20:58There is not going to be one with reform because reform would be lucky to hold on to Rupert Lowe's seat, let alone win 30, 40, 50 seats across the country. I don't see that happening. Well, from one dysfunctional institution to another, let's discuss Cambridge and the ongoing Jason Arde saga.

21:26Jacob, I came home last night and my husband turned around and said, Now he's cancelled his book tour. I was like, what are you talking about? Jason Arday continues to dominate the thoughts of people in news, but also just people in the country. The world's shiniest academic. Don't quite know what's going on with his skincare, but my goodness me, he glows. Not so much now. And I'm wondering whether this whole house of cards is really now in freefall because there aren't just implications for him and his future career. and I think there are some who will have sympathy. It's silly season. This guy has been the centre of so many headlines.

22:01He probably just wants to disappear under a rock. But the implications for Cambridge, this is starting to get really dicey for them. We've got a number of revelations that we need to discuss. First of all, that we've got now, according to Andrew Gilligan, now working for The Spectator, a Cambridge research professor who was working in the same faculty as our day did, Farah Ahmed, was once a supporter of Hizb-e-Tahir, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, and now banned terror group. What's Cambridge playing at? This is madness. Well, it's the danger of clever people, is that clever people can be deeply, deeply stupid, and they seem to have drunk the DEI Kool-Aid and thought that any rogue who comes along and is diverse must be a genius and it is the most extraordinary inverted racism.

22:57What I can't quite work out is this, and I think this is the public's problem, those of us who weren't lucky enough to be educated at Oxbridge look upon these two institutions, sorry to mention your previous university, in this case Oxford isn't actually at fault, but lumping them together, these are meant to be kind of esteemed seats of learning where you would expect the highest educational standards to be met. And the problem, isn't it, with a case like this now and the case of our day, is regardless of whether or not you think he ran marathons with a broken leg and raised millions for charity and all the rest of it, it's that they haven't met the scholarly bar.

23:38This is the kind of stuff that you would associate with what the Tories like to describe as colleges which do Mickey Mouse courses. Well, yes, and sociology is a bit of a Mickey Mouse subject. Well, is it? My brother-in-law teaches it. Well, I'm sorry about that, but it's not a rigorous subject in the same way that the classics are or history is or chemistry or physics or mathematics. Some people could rightfully ask what the point of Sardine classics is, to be honest. Well, it's a great understanding of how the past operated. Sociologists might argue it's a great way to understand how people operate today.

24:13But I don't think it does that because it seems to be just a selection of personal opinions and personal feelings. It seems to have wandered into the my truth, the June Dutch of Sussex view of the world, which Arday was particularly strong at. It was his truth, therefore it was true. You've also got all this junk about decolonizing the curriculum, which means not teaching people facts and proper information, but being touchy-feely, which is all junk. And I can see how it happens. I can see how it happens. because I think our old image of Oxford and Cambridge is probably broadly true. Lord Bigger was writing about this today.

24:51Yes, Nigel Bigger. Nigel Bigger, the noble lord, thinking of Oxford and Cambridge dons sitting in smoke-filled rooms, puffing on their pipe with holes in their pullovers. And then in comes some glamorous young creature who says, away with the pipes and away with the smoke, what we're going to do is Mickey Mouse and they think oh yes Mickey Mouse very serious Mickey Mouse very interesting and he's clearly very clever we'd better make him a professor otherwise we'll be out of touch like all those people at the next door college who don't know what's going on don't know which way is up and they're sort of sucked into it because they're drawn by the fashion and they're basically unfashionable people who think this is where everybody's going But anyone with a modicum of intellect, one would hope, would reject the idea that anyone that criticises Professor Arde is ergo a racist.

25:51And as is the testimony of one student who was taught by Arde at Roehampton, who reveals that he accused her of, quote, white privilege after she questioned the mark he gave her for a paper. She was averaging 75 percent and he gave her 70 percent. And apparently these papers are marked blind, so you don't actually know whose paper you're marking. And she said, listen, I normally get about 5 % more, so why have you marked me down? He then said, oh, you're now demonstrating white privilege to me. Anybody with a degree of education, one would hope, might question this sort of absolute hat stand. What terrifies clever people the most?

26:32Other very clever people? Not appearing clever. Right. And so somebody comes along with a bogus phrase like white privilege that nobody knows what it means, if it has any meaning, when some of the least well-off in this country are white working-class boys. It's a bogus expression. But clever people don't want to admit they don't know something. So they say, oh, white privilege. Oh, yes, that's very unfortunate. You've got white privilege. and therefore they take mumbo-jumbo seriously because they don't want to be exposed as being ignorant about a particular area of knowledge, whereas in fact the area of knowledge is humbug.

27:09But isn't that extraordinary that actually undereducated white working-class boys would have a better understanding of the ludicrous nature of white privilege than your average Cambridge don? Well, it's all the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, isn't it? That clever people don't wish to appear stupid in front of other clever people. And the clever people have bought into all this DEI nonsense. They don't want to say this just isn't true. It's wrong. Some people, some clever people have questioned the DEI stuff. So there's an interesting link here because David Starkey, who himself was extremely esteemed at Cambridge as a historian, but ended up being junked by the university and practically every other organisation he was ever associated with because of the comment he made to Darren Grimes.

27:58and he was, I mean, ritualistically cancelled at the height of cancelled culture. And in retrospect, comparatively to the Arde allegations, I mean, it was small fry, it was different, but because it was deemed racism, that's it, your entire career is over. He's just done a podcast with the chap who initially exposed the Arde plagiarism claims who's called Nathan Kofnas. Now, Nathan Kofnas is a controversial figure because he himself was fired by Cambridge in 2024 because if he suggested that if meritocracy did exist in academia, actually there wouldn't be that many black professors. He was called racist for that.

28:42So the other problem we've got here is that academics, regardless of their motivations, and I don't know anything further about Nathan Kofnass, and some have said, you know, he's a white supremacist blogger. Okay, fine. But you've got academics quoting actual academic research that's been configured by Harvard, which I think is pretty respected as an institution of academia. And even though that's what the figures say, anyone that quotes them is then described as a racist. So how can you ever solve this problem if even bona fide academic research is debunked on the basis that it contains hurty words?

29:22People running HR in universities aren't the cleverest professors, are they? They're people who could be running HR anyway. And they have applied all these rules that have come from the public sector, from the public sector quality duty, from all sorts of pressures that society has brought to bear to compensate for perceived errors of the past. and so this leads to people shutting up partly because they don't want to appear stupid and partly because if they dare say anything they then get cancelled and this got completely ridiculous during the Black Lives Matter thing when I was told not to say all lives matter because that would in itself have been a racist thing to say Yes Well if you said something like well no I just don't think we should be taking the knee and I'm a bit concerned about BLM because I think it is a communist organisation It's a communist organisation, later revealed to be mismanaging funds, that wants to defund the police.

30:20And do you know what? I'm quite keen on the police because I quite like them catching criminals and things. And then someone turns around and says, you're a racist and a bigot. I mean, you can't really win that argument. But who else is fuelling these flames? Lawyers. Also very well-educated people. I'd imagine some of the people that constructed this letter from Carter Ruck to the Times Higher Educational Supplement reporter, Jack Groves, who initially wanted to report Arde's deficiencies, let's say in his citations in his dissertation. Well, that letter by Carter Ruck to basically scare the journalist off from publishing what he had found.

30:56And let's bear in mind, he was working on this for months. Clearly, there were rumours bubbling to the surface that Arde might not be quite what he seemed. And Arde, as is his right, consulted a media lawyer, Carter Ruck. We do have a nickname for that company in this newsroom. Private Eye used to. Indeed, we all did. And it's not a word you would ever use, Jacob. No, it's not. Let's be perfectly honest. No, that's quite true. Anyway, he's picked apart. So Dan Needle, who's a tax lawyer, but he also kind of is a pseudo journalist because he does lots of things on X, kind of revealing deficiencies in paperwork.

31:31Let's put it that way, just simplify it. Has basically said, well, this letter from Carter Ruck itself contains a number of inaccuracies, including the allegation that the only reason that Jason was pursuing this story is because he was a racist, that actually it was being racially motivated. This was a racially motivated attack on a professor. Now, the THC came back and said, well, no, of course not. We're just trying to find out whether a professor that has been heavily pushed by Cambridge, heavily pushed by the BBC. By the way, I appeared on Question Time with Jason Arday. I remember meeting him backstage as you do when you have those sandwiches and a drink.

32:09He was there. Stella Creasy was there. It was a right old fun time for me. I actually took my daughter along. He was very pleasant to my daughter. Very nice chap. Came out with this whole, I was nonverbal till 18, but now I've got a PhD. And at the time I thought, well, God, I remember saying to my eldest, this is what an extraordinary chap. I mean, there was a degree of incredulity, but he looked so sweet. And as he himself said, I just thought you'd believe me. I mean, I did believe him. Why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't you? But Dan Needle has made the point that we've now got people at Carter Rock and others, sort of, they're exercising lawfare on behalf of those who want to point and shout at anybody who says, is Jason Arde quite what it seems, and follow up with racists and bigot.

32:53I mean, the whole world's gone mad here, Jake. Carter Rock is one of the law firms that gives the law a bad name. It is the great enemy of freedom of speech. It has represented some of the most unpleasant people to try and shut down stories by bullying the press. Its modus operandi is to bully and to outspend. It has been a malign force on public discourse in this country since Peter Carter Ruck himself was alive. It is a bad way of carrying out freedom of speech in this country, and our laws need to change so that lawyers like Carter Ruck do not have a business. It's been a disastrous consequence of the Human Rights Act that has elevated privacy to a right which never previously existed.

33:38And members of parliament never voted for a privacy law because they wouldn't dare because everyone would have thought it was politicians covering up for themselves. And now you find that newspapers, other media outlets can't report things because they get these sorts of letters. It's quite interesting, the letter you read out, because I wonder whether that in itself contains a libel. Well, it might do. Accusing somebody of being racist seems to me to be a libel. So I hope that the journalist of the Times Higher Education Supplement will consider suing Carter Ruck. Well, you'd love to think so.

34:12Wouldn't that be fun? But of course, the Times Higher Education Supplement is no longer Murdoch-owned. This is why they sat on these allegations for months. They were put off by Carter Ruck. Then they thought, can we really take this on? We don't have the budget to fight a legal case. I didn't realise that. That's right. So this is the other reason. I think if it was Murdoch owned and they put all of the welly and his money behind, they'd have gone ahead with it. They actually spiked the story, as it's known in the trade, until they could build up more evidence. But I mean, this letter is comprehensive.

34:39It's three pages long. It's using pretty robust language. Needle points out very correctly that this is a slap letter. That's a strategic lawsuit against public participation. Now, newspapers like The Telegraph, helped by peers like Baroness Stuhl and others, have tried to fight against slaps. As somebody who did a law degree and is now a journalist, I absolutely believe in people's rights to defend themselves against inaccuracies in newspapers, defamatory statements, invective, and all the rest of it. Of course, people must have a right to reply. Actually, you don't have a right to defend yourself against invective.

35:15Mere rudery is a defence. Mere abuse is a defence in a libel action. Mild abuse, but you could action invective. If I literally just unleashed on you and said, I'm not going to do it now, but if I said the most terrible things about you that weren't in conjunction with anything that you'd said and done, you could have a legal claim against it. Yeah, but you are allowed mere abuse. You are some mere abuse, yeah. It's fine. Mere abuse between friends is fine. But I think that the old laws worked, that you could sue for inaccuracy and the onus of proof was on the publisher. Yes, justification. You had to prove what you're writing is true.

35:54But now you can get into trouble if you print things that are true. And that's the real problem with the way the law has changed. Also, Carter Ruck turns around and says, oh, by the way, these plagiarism claims are the subject of an internal Cambridge investigation, but that's confidential. Therefore, you can't report it. Absolute hat stand. Of course you can report that the university is carrying out an investigation to one of its key professors. But that's where you get into privacy laws. Yeah. And that's where we've gone wrong because people say that this is private and therefore the subject of an inquiry has a reasonable expectation of privacy and therefore it's unreasonable to print it.

36:33But is this now possibly threatening the job of the vice-chancellor, Deborah Prentice? She caught in a vice. Very good, Jacob. That's why you're so well-educated. It gets better because perhaps she's not so good at her job. She is a Prentice doing it. Oh, honestly. And to think you didn't even study English language. because there's some more allegations that have come to light. I think point one, problematic that you promoted Professor Arday despite all of these concerns being raised, I think, for quite some time. Problem two, Cambridge has just lost this whistleblowing tribunal. So basically it's rather involved, but there's a row that a professor tried to suppress a whistleblower from raising concerns about misogyny and other matters in the department.

37:19And students are now rightly turning around and going, well, what's the point of any DEI if you yourself are repressing people who are trying to expose wrongdoing? Point two. Point three, we now got this lady who supports a, well, did once support a banned terrorist group in the same faculty as Arday. That's problematic. This woman, let's not forget, apprentice, Prentice, is on half a million a year. It's nice money if you can get it. But where's the vicarious responsibility for any of this? And I quote, actually, the woman who was taught by Arday at Roehampton, and I think this is the killer line in her piece.

37:54The whole piece is interesting because she says he was sort of like coming into four-hour lectures, only teaching for one hour, putting his feet on the desk, talking about Beyonce and just matters of utter irrelevance. I mean, when can we just assess people and say, I don't care what colour you are. Are you good enough or aren't you? Please have the job if you're good enough. If you're not, can you let someone else get the job? Absolutely. Appointments should be on marriage. This is what she writes, which I think is, this is the nub of this issue. And I know you and Tim touched on this last week.

38:27Some serious soul searching must surely follow from all the academics who enabled him to climb the academic ladder. Did they really help this young man or were they only thinking of their own reputations? They might also spare a thought for all his students. Because that's the other thing here, right? She makes the point that about three quarters of her course at Roehampton were people of colour. Some of them were young black women for whom university is an experience. They were the first to encounter it in their entire family. No one in their family had gone to university. They're the first. They get into this course with this esteemed professor that's meant to be the best thing since sliced bread academically.

39:07And he comes and delivers some half-hearted lectures. She cites one girl who came up to her in the library and says, I just don't know what to write. I haven't got anything decent in my notes. So these apparently clever people are letting down students at Roehampton. Imagine working that hard with all of your GCSEs and A-levels to get to Cambridge to then be confronted by somebody who has made up a lot of their own CV, allegedly plagiarised most of their own PhD and isn't actually teaching you that well at all. And you're paying, what is it,£9 ,250 a year for the privilege. Well, I think at Cambridge, it's certainly at Oxford, it's slightly different.

39:46You're meant to do a lot of the work for yourself. And that's part of the Oxford experience. It's less a teaching establishment in that way, as it would be at a school, than a self-motivated, you get on with it and you go to the library and you look things up and the lecturers give you pointers rather than classes. Having said that, you are letting down students if the person marking their exams doesn't have the knowledge to mark their exams. And that seems to me an absolute failing. And even if they've got a qualification, they will have to ask whether that qualification is worth anything if he was the man doing the marking, because what did he know about it?

40:23So I think it's a big problem. And it's where Cambridge has behaved so badly, because it wanted a poster boy. It wanted somebody that could say, look, we've got a black professor. Aren't we good at DEI? We've ticked that box. And he's a remarkable man. And he runs marathons in half an hour, etc. etc. Yeah. And that lets down the students, the whole sense of academic excellence at Cambridge, it'll probably harm its funding because people think, well, why should I give money to Cambridge when it can't run its affairs properly? Therefore, Prentice has to consider her position. Well, I don't know.

40:59I'm always reluctant to say people should resign on the first instance. I seem to remember, hold on, I seem to remember she took over from somebody worse who was killing or free speech in Cambridge. Yes. And they had a great round of free speech. She came in and has done some good work, I think, to put that right. And I think Cambridge is clearly a basket case. Well, let's also look at this evidence. Students told Cambridge to decolonise before Jason Arday was hired. A letter signed by 152 students in the university's Faculty of Education in 2020 called on the department to make systemic changes to its hiring practices.

41:36That open letter said that the hiring processes must be decolonised in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd. It was sent to Professor Susan Robertson on her retirement two years later. Arday was hired. Now, again, it's for the vice chancellor and the senior figures in this university to look upon little mini student protests, little grown up children tantrums about Black Lives Matter and throwing statues in rivers and all that and say, hang on a minute. Hang on. Sorry, kids. I mean, they're the kids here. I know they're grown up, they're young adults, but kids, take a breath. The grownups are in charge of this.

42:17We're not just going to knee-jerk on the back of George Floyd and employ people simply because of the colour of their skin, because that in itself is racist. You're absolutely right. That's the point of Don's. They're there to run the show and to ignore childish protests. And this again comes back to using peculiar language that doesn't mean anything. And people don't want to admit they don't know what it means or they think it's meaningless. So what is decolonising the curriculum. What does that mean as a term? Yes. And how do your employment practices decolonise anything? Decolonisation is Princess Margaret going out, a band playing, the flag coming down, you leave and they elect a government which a week later turns into a dictatorship.

42:59That's what decolonisation was. Yeah. And we did it. We did it rather well actually. We did it rather elegantly, more elegantly than any other country. Do you know what? You could decolonise your wardrobe. It's a bit too British Empire for me, this double-breasted suit thing. If you decolonised your wardrobe, you would appear on the next OET in leisure wear. But this is broadly leisure wear. It's not broadly leisure wear. It is. It's a buttoned up suit with tie. And what, because you're not wearing a waistcoat and you haven't got a pocket watch? Actually, it's a 20-year-old suit, so it's very much an August suit.

43:34Fair enough. Right, you're off on your hollybobs now. you're going to be donning a short-sleeved shirt, a slightly more lightweight tie, possibly a linen jacket. No, I don't have any short-sleeved shirts. So you're going to be wearing that on your holiday in Somerset? Well, I might wear a tweed, Kate. Jacob, have a lovely time in Somerset. Thank you. See you soon and I'll be back with Poppy Coburn tomorrow, 5pm.

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