The Met Commissioner called it a mistake. Four months spent investigating Jack Grove, a journalist for asking questions of a Cambridge professor, Jason Arday and never once speaking to him, tells a different story.
Scotland Yard Didn’t Drop the Ball. It Picked a Side.
Sir Mark Rowley went on LBC this week and said the quiet part out loud. Asked why the Metropolitan Police spent four months investigating a journalist for the crime of asking questions, the Commissioner told Nick Ferrari: “We dropped the ball on that one, let’s not beat around the bush.” He added, more revealingly, that the complaint should never have got past the front desk in the first place.
It was meant to sound like candour. It reads more like a confession.
The journalist is Jack Grove, a reporter at Times Higher Education. His offence was emailing Professor Jason Arday, a sociology of education professor at Cambridge, with questions about his academic record, after academics tipped him off to apparent similarities between parts of Arday’s PhD thesis and another student’s work. Grove also asked about Arday’s claimed fundraising total and his ultra-distance running feats. Ordinary reporting. The kind of thing journalism exists to do.
Somebody, and it still isn’t clear exactly who, rang the police. Cambridge University has since said flatly that it never made a complaint and wasn’t aware of one being made. Whoever it was, the Met treated a plagiarism inquiry as a potential crime and sat on it for four months. Grove was never interviewed. He learned he’d been under investigation only when officers rang to say the case was closed, and told him not to contact Arday again because the professor’s “mental health” had been affected. Arday’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck, then wrote to Grove’s editors suggesting the paper’s scrutiny of a Black academic “may be” racially motivated, a charge that dissolves the moment you notice the questions were about a PhD thesis, not his skin colour.
Continue @ Heartlands.
