{"id":330286,"date":"2026-08-22T05:15:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T05:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=330286"},"modified":"2026-08-22T05:44:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T05:44:11","slug":"for-jason-arday-attacks-in-the-left-wing-media-must-have-been-harder-to-take-than-attacks-in-the-right-wing-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=330286","title":{"rendered":"For Jason Arday, Attacks in the \u2018Left Wing Media\u2019 Must Have Been Harder to Take Than Attacks in the \u2018Right Wing Media\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Toby Young \u2013 The Daily Sceptic Aug 21, 2026<\/strong><\/h1>\n

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 \u2018right wing media\u2019 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\u2019ve written about this in the latest issue of the Spectator<\/em>. This is how it begins<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Should I regret writing a satirical piece for this magazine about Jason Arday? Yes, according to those who blame the \u2018right-wing media\u2019 for his death. A petition started by Jolyon Maugham this week calling for a public inquiry into the \u201cpress harassment\u201d of Arday has gained more than 100,000 signatures. A letter from Dawn Butler MP to Ipso urges the independent press regulator to use \u2018every available lever\u2019 to take \u2018decisive action\u2019 against the Times<\/em>, Telegraph<\/em>, Mail<\/em> and Spectator<\/em>. Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian<\/em>, has named me as a particularly egregious offender, while the novelist Will Self has called for the journalists who exposed Arday\u2019s wrongdoing to be prosecuted.<\/p>\n

It is impossible at this stage to know the exact circumstances surrounding the 41-year-old academic\u2019s death. But I think it\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019d been given wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s final days jumped out when I read it: he\u2019d lost a lot of weight over the past few weeks. Exactly the same happened to me.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing. I wasn\u2019t particularly bothered by all the attacks in the left-wing media or from left-wing \u2018personalities\u2019. I told myself they were just seizing an opportunity to take down a political enemy and discredit a cause they disapproved of \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

So I would hazard a guess that Arday was able to brush off the articles in the Times<\/em>, Telegraph<\/em>, Mail<\/em> and Spectator<\/em>, but found the negative coverage in the Guardian<\/em>, the New York Times<\/em> and the Atlantic<\/em> 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\u2019s website condemning those who questioned Arday\u2019s credentials as \u2018racist\u2019, 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 \u201cthe victim of a vile campaign\u201d, 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\u2019t the saintly figure he\u2019d imagined, explaining that he wasn\u2019t the author of the petition, he\u2019d merely agreed to \u2018carry\u2019 it on his website, and hadn\u2019t had an opportunity to investigate the allegations because he\u2019d been on holiday. \u201cI am sure that many journalists \u2013 and friends of mine \u2013 are acting in good faith when describing him as a \u2018fantasist\u2019,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

That must have been difficult for Arday to read.<\/p>\n

Worth reading in full<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Stop Press:<\/strong> Nathan himself has written a piece in the Wall St Journal<\/em> about being scapegoated for Arday\u2019s death. Click here<\/a> to read \u2013 last time I tried, it wasn\u2019t behind a paywall.<\/p>\n

Support the Daily Sceptic<\/strong><\/h3>\n

We are funded by our readers. If you value independent journalism, please consider supporting us.<\/p>\n

Donate<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Source\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Such is the left\u2019s anger over Jason Arday\u2019s exposure that novelist Will Self has called for the journalists who revealed Arday\u2019s wrongdoing to be prosecuted<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":329628,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature-posts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=330286"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330288,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330286\/revisions\/330288"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/329628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=330286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=330286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=330286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}