For Jason Arday, Attacks in the ‘Left Wing Media’ Must Have Been Harder to Take Than Attacks in the ‘Right Wing Media’

I know from my own experience of being cancelled in 2018, that being turned on by people you expected to be on your side is far more painful than being attacked by your enemies. For that reason, I doubt the coverage of the Jason Arday affair in the ‘right wing media’ was a major factor in his anguish, as the enemies of press freedom are claiming. More damaging to his mental health would have been the attacks in the left wing media and the cascade of people who initially defended him, changing their minds. I’ve written about this in the latest issue of the Spectator. This is how it begins:

Should I regret writing a satirical piece for this magazine about Jason Arday? Yes, according to those who blame the ‘right-wing media’ for his death. A petition started by Jolyon Maugham this week calling for a public inquiry into the “press harassment” of Arday has gained more than 100,000 signatures. A letter from Dawn Butler MP to Ipso urges the independent press regulator to use ‘every available lever’ to take ‘decisive action’ against the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator. Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, has named me as a particularly egregious offender, while the novelist Will Self has called for the journalists who exposed Arday’s wrongdoing to be prosecuted.

It is impossible at this stage to know the exact circumstances surrounding the 41-year-old academic’s death. But I think it’s unlikely the right-wing media played a big part. I say this as someone who was publicly shamed at the beginning of 2018, so have an inkling of what Arday must have been going through. It wasn’t on the same scale but, like him, I was relentlessly targeted, with my sins gleefully paraded before the world, and like him I had to resign from a job that was my main source of income. The position I’d been given wasn’t as prestigious, but an official inquiry was launched and it concluded the appointments process had been flawed. It was a miserable period, and one detail of Arday’s final days jumped out when I read it: he’d lost a lot of weight over the past few weeks. Exactly the same happened to me.

But here’s the thing. I wasn’t particularly bothered by all the attacks in the left-wing media or from left-wing ‘personalities’. I told myself they were just seizing an opportunity to take down a political enemy and discredit a cause they disapproved of – in my case, free schools. What really stung was being turned on by people I thought were on the same side. I remember listening to an emergency debate in the Commons about the scandal of my appointment and wincing whenever a Conservative MP rose to their feet to condemn me. The same was true of attacks in right-wing newspapers and magazines, particularly if they were by people I knew. That made me think that perhaps I deserved all the opprobrium after all.

So I would hazard a guess that Arday was able to brush off the articles in the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator, but found the negative coverage in the Guardian, the New York Times and the Atlantic more difficult to cope with. For me, the most devastating blows were delivered by political allies who first supported me, then had a change of heart. And the list of those who deserted Arday, having initially leapt to his defence, is quite long. It includes the heads of two Cambridge colleges who signed the original petition on Maugham’s website condemning those who questioned Arday’s credentials as ‘racist’, but who then quietly took their names off, as well as Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge neuroscientist who also signed it and then removed his name. It also encompasses Cambridge University, which put out a statement when the plagiarism allegations first surfaced describing Arday as “the victim of a vile campaign”, only to do a volte-face and announce it was going to investigate him after all. Up to a point, it even includes Maugham himself, who wrote a rambling piece when it turned out Arday wasn’t the saintly figure he’d imagined, explaining that he wasn’t the author of the petition, he’d merely agreed to ‘carry’ it on his website, and hadn’t had an opportunity to investigate the allegations because he’d been on holiday. “I am sure that many journalists – and friends of mine – are acting in good faith when describing him as a ‘fantasist’,” he wrote.

That must have been difficult for Arday to read.

Worth reading in full.

Stop Press: Nathan himself has written a piece in the Wall St Journal about being scapegoated for Arday’s death. Click here to read – last time I tried, it wasn’t behind a paywall.