Andrew Gilligan

You know what the SAS’s problem is, according to Monica Grenfell, a civil servant who worked at their HQ? They 'swear all the time,' she said, which was not acceptable in other workplaces, adding: 'You can't go into M&S and say [someone] is a f***ing c***.'  As she put it, 'there are nasty characters there and nasty characters who really ruled the roost.' I am not making this up. She really did say it in an interview with the Times. It hasn’t had anything like the attention it needs as an illustration of how far some of our public servants have lost contact with reality.  I hate to break this to Monica Grenfell, but soldiers of all regiments swear a lot. The SAS have a quite different job from sales assistants in clothes shops.

Many of Britain’s institutions are being destroyed from within by leaders who do not seem to understand what they are for. But even by those standards, the Church of England is a special case, as shown by its decision to spend the 25th anniversary of 9/11 giving a supporter of Osama bin Laden a prize for ‘reconciliation and interfaith cooperation.’ The tragedy of the Church of England – and it is a tragedy – is that we have seldom been in greater need of spiritual and moral leadership. As Matthew Arnold’s famous Dover Beach, lamenting the Sea of Faith’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,’ puts it: ‘We are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.

A man called Lester Holloway has written a savage attack on black reporters who covered the Jason Arday scandal, saying they “have blood on [their] hands” and suggesting that they should put their supposed loyalty to their race above their duty as journalists. In a piece for the Voice newspaper, Holloway says: “Jason told me and others that articles written by black people had hurt him most…. We as a community need serious introspection, because our people – his people – wounded Jason most deeply…. Some of our community have blood on our hands.” He also claimed there was “emerging evidence that Jason’s amazing achievements could actually be true” (we have previously dealt with some of this evidence.

Cambridge University’s “independent inquiry” into the events around Jason Arday appears already to have decided what its outcome will be. We can say this for a few reasons. The first is a small, but critical, difference between two statements about the inquiry made by the university on Friday. One was a message to students and staff from the Vice-Chancellor, Deborah Prentice. This said that the second part of the inquiry would include a “broader review… of the support available to academics who are subjected to excessive public and media scrutiny.” It just won’t do.

The principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, has insisted he was telling the “truth” when he said that Jason Arday was murdered – or in his words, was the victim of a “lynching” and a “public assassination” by people who had decided that “Jason doesn’t deserve to be alive.” The reaction of Woolley’s fellow activists to our initial post was, inevitably, to say that questioning all these untruths was racist In a LinkedIn post Simon Woolley, Lord Woolley, has doubled down on his factually false and racially inflammatory claims, saying he was “speak[ing] truth to power” and “nor would I change my actions. Not for a moment.

A man stands at a rally in Trafalgar Square, ranting that Jason Arday was murdered in a 'lynching' and 'public assassination' by 'rabid wolves' and 'dogs of hell' who had decided that 'Jason doesn’t deserve to be alive'. Some rabble-rouser from the lower shallows of race activism? No, or at least not solely. The man who said these inflammatory words is a peer of the realm and the principal of Homerton College, Cambridge: Simon Woolley, Lord Woolley of Woodford. His behaviour at the rally last week, surely unprecedented for someone in those roles, is further evidence that unsuitable appointments at Cambridge did not begin with Jason Arday.

Professor Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s education faculty, is best known as the woman who fawned over her new hire, Jason Arday, as “the best in the world.” Now here is further evidence that Cremin, and the department she runs, have completely lost their faculties. Cam, the university’s alumni magazine, runs a regular feature entitled “This idea must die.” Last month, in a bizarre, stream-of-consciousness contribution to that slot, Professor Cremin nominated for death….the school system. “Many schools function a bit like a prison, a factory or the army,” Cremin claims “Many schools function a bit like a prison, a factory or the army,” she claims.

An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution. It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.” It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday.

After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University. We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday. Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’.

Al Gore never quite recovered from claiming, in 1999, that ‘I took the initiative in creating the internet.’ The former vice-president spent the rest of his life protesting he didn’t mean he’d actually created it, but never managed to escape the thousands of what were not then called memes showing him discovering penicillin, winning peace between the Israelis and the Arabs, and scoring the winning home run for the New York Yankees. Bus policy is not in the same league, I know. But for someone committed to new, honest politics, Andy Burnham has a nasty habit of claiming credit for things which were not his doing, or where the credit truthfully belongs to other people as well as to him.

Andy Burnham’s pledge to be ‘for all of us’ may include hiring a man for his Downing Street staff who called 9/11 a ‘false flag’ that the US ‘knew of… in advance’, made jibes against Jews, defended an advocacy group that called Jihadi John a ‘beautiful young man’, and said that exposés of the child grooming scandals were a ‘racist campaign’. Ali Milani, chair of the Labour Muslim Network, has been working closely with Burnham in the run-up to his election as Makerfield MP and Labour leader, helping with his social media, and has been repeatedly spoken of as an expected hire in No. 10’s digital communications team. What hasn’t been reported in the coverage of Milani’s potential new job is his views.

Lewisham’s Green council plans to officially collaborate with a group which seeks to ‘resist raids’ on illegal migrants ‘at all costs’, and has posted on its Instagram an illustration of a Home Office immigration enforcement van set on fire with its windows smashed.  At next week’s full council meeting, Hau-Yu Tam, the council’s cabinet member for ‘communities, sanctuary and healing’, has tabled a motion ‘to work with Lewisham Anti-Raids to support migrant businesses and those targeted by raids’ because ‘local and joined-up anti-raids resistance is a form of building care with Lewisham communities.

A newly-elected Green councillor who is also an NHS GP is being investigated by the General Medical Council after The Spectator revealed that she repeatedly attacked ‘Zios’ and called on people to ‘burn Zionism to the ground.’ Rebecca Jones, a doctor at the Hilly Fields practice in Lewisham, and councillor for the nearby Blackheath ward, announced on her Facebook page that the medical regulator has ‘opened an investigation into my fitness to practice. It's one of the worst bits of professional news a doctor can receive.’ The GMC can suspend or prohibit a doctor from practice.