Toby Young
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.
Like Arday, I was relentlessly targeted, with my sins gleefully paraded before the world
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.
