Exposed: The Cambridge University PR attacking Jason Arday’s black critics

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 .) Perhaps all this low-gradery is just what you get when you replace academics with activists What you wouldn’t know from the article, because his interest is nowhere declared, is that Lester Holloway is the official spokesman for Simon Woolley, Lord Woolley, the race activist inexplicably elevated to principal of Homerton College, Cambridge and one of the key people who helped create Jason Arday.

Holloway, a fellow race crusader who has a long relationship with Woolley, has under his leadership been made head of communications at Homerton, a staff position with a cam.ac.uk email address. Perhaps unusually for a PR, Holloway has also been made a fellow of the college. We have previously covered Woolley’s unsuitability for his post, including his false and inflammatory claim that Arday was murdered – in his words, the victim of a “lynching” and “public assassination” by people who had decided that “Jason doesn’t deserve to be alive.”

Woolley has since doubled down on these comments, saying he was “speak[ing] truth to power,” an interesting conceit for a Cambridge college head and peer of the realm defending obvious falsehoods. Most popular Amol Rajan Now I’ve left Today, I can finally say what I really think… Natasha Hausdorff The Israeli settlements lie Tim Shipman Meet the most powerful woman in Britain Holloway goes even further than Woolley, however, in arguing that the black reporters on the Arday story were not just killers but, it would appear, traitors to their race – and that they should somehow not be proper journalists but “our people,” owned by the black community, or “his [Arday’s] people,” prepared to promote lies if someone has the right skin colour.

This strikes me as itself racist, casting wholly unwarranted aspersions on the professionalism of black colleagues. Holloway claims that the “250 national legacy media articles” published about Arday “contrast” with the fact that “the UK media mentioned Peter Mandelson just 119 times after the Epstein files were released.” The 119 figure comes from an activist group called NewsCord, which purports to enforce truth and “accountability” on the press.

NewsCord’s version of truth and accountability is sadly not the same as the actual truth, or as actually being able to count. In just the first month after the release of the files, the Factiva press database shows almost 3,000 mentions of Mandelson in UK national papers alone. Holloway singles out “one particularly damaging article [about Arday] in a so-called progressive newspaper” which Arday told him “was worse than ‘100 articles from the Telegraph .’”

This is presumably the piece by Lanre Bakare of the Guardian , to whom Arday claimed that he had been twice confronted at work by a masked man who threatened him, the second time with a knife, and that a severed pig’s head had been sent to his parents’ home in a further act of hate. Alas, Bakare made the mistake, common to professional journalists of all races, of checking these picaresque allegations. Finding no evidence for them, finding that Arday couldn’t produce any evidence either, and learning that they had not been reported to anyone at the time, he wrote that – instead of the stenographic endorsement of the fantasy that was clearly wanted.

His reward was an attack from the reliably awful Jolyon Maugham and a social media pile-on. But even Maugham didn’t accuse him of having Arday’s blood on his hands. Bakare has now had to take down his X account, make his other social media private and hasn’t written for the Guardian for more than a month. So much for protecting people from harassment. Alongside Woolley, the lead signatory, Holloway also signed Maugham’s notorious letter claiming the accusations against Arday were “baseless” and racist and praising his “remarkable scholarship.”

Again, he didn’t mention his connection with Woolley or Homerton. His Voice piece was written in a “personal capacity” and his Maugham signature was given in his capacity as a “columnist for the Voice .” No doubt because he has been so busy with all this, Holloway has for more than a fortnight been unable to respond to The Spectator ’s questions about a false statement made by Homerton to justify Woolley’s appointment . Homerton’s official announcement of the job said that “in 2018 Lord Woolley was appointed by prime minister Theresa May to create and lead the UK government’s pioneering Race Disparity Unit.”

This is not true. The unit was actually created in 2016 and led throughout by a career civil servant, Marcus Bell. Woolley’s role, starting two years later, was as the chair of its advisory group. The falsehood about Woolley’s CV has not been corrected and remains live on Homerton’s website. The college continues to refuse to say whether it was an Arday-style embellishment by Woolley or whether it was made up by Homerton. Lester Holloway’s other scholarship in the field of media studies, by the way, includes attacking the press for “demonising Robert Mugabe.”

Perhaps all this low-gradery is just what you get when you replace academics with activists. But what on earth is going on at Homerton? What on earth is going on at Cambridge? What on earth is going on in Britain?