12 Years a Slave by Steve McQueen is a superb film, but I have only been able to watch it once. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Solomon Northup, a real person who was abducted and enslaved. One scene depicts Northup being flogged and McQueen shows the protracted punishment more or less in real time. It Is brutal and stays with you.

I chose not to read much of the press coverage about Jason Arday because every article in The Times, The Telegraph and the Spectator felt like it was another rich white journalist giving a public flogging to a presumptuous black man. Still, I think now that we know the results of their work it is important to put names to some of the people wielding the whip.

A search of the Spectator’s site shows thirty one articles with titles like “Sociology is about much more than fools like Jason Arday” by Patrick West, “Should the police investigate Jason Arday?” by David Spencer, “The Jason Arday debacle is becoming a national scandal” by James Hanson. Andrew Gilligan even threw in a bit of guilt by association in a piece called “Meet Farah Ahmed, Jason Arday’s colleague” writing “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.”

In the Telegraph Allison Pearson wrote about “The Cambridge fantasist is proof that stupid intellectuals are poisoning Britain”, Annabel Denham had a piece “Jason Arday is merely a symptom of academia’s moral disease” and Robert Tombs wrote “Cambridge has failed at every turn over Jason Arday”. This is a selection of the twenty two articles the paper published about Arday.

The Times decided that an internal disciplinary matter at a university warranted sixty one articles. This is infinitely more journalistic resource than it has dedicated to the living conditions in Gaza or settler ethnic cleansing on the West Bank.

Recycling the Gilligan article Ali Mitib again tried to link Arday with jihadism “Jason Arday colleague called western education a threat to Islam”. Camilla Long wrote “In Jason Arday’s Cambridge, clever people have become stupid” and Sarah Ditum’s review of his book was titled “Jason Arday’s memoir is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe”.

Jason Arday is dead now and, at the time of writing, his cause of death is unknown. But we can reasonably assume that having the entire weight of the right wing press bearing down on him for a month was a significant contributory factor. Peter Mandelson is reported as having said he was “working every single day to bring down Jeremy Corbyn… and to destroy him as a man.” Gilligan, Ditum, Long and Pearson set out to do exactly the same thing to Arday. They, and the editors who commissioned and ran their articles, set out to metaphorically tie him to a post and flog him in full view of their readers, his colleagues and student and the wider public. Like an overseer on a plantation they got carried away by the euphoria of dishing out the whip and accidentally killed the victim. Unlike Corbyn, who had a huge network of support which enabled him to stay strong, Jason Arday seems to have been cast adrift by his employer and no one’s family network is an adequate counterweight to every major right wing title baying for your blood.

The death of Jason Arday is more than a tragedy for him and his family. It was coordinated racist bullying of someone who made mistakes and may even have told lies. The message is that if you are part of the inner circle of approved ruling class opinion like Boris Johnson, Robert Jenrick or Jeremy Clarkson, lying is no barrier to elevation.  If you are not, you can expect the hounds to come after you to destroy you psychologically or physically.