For Peter Neumann, Professor of Security Studies at King’s College London, January 2024 was not a pleasant month. As UnHerd reported at the time, an online journal called Fathom published an article by Anna Stanley, a young and obscure former Foreign Office official, describing a summer school terrorism course for civil servants that she had attended at the university the previous autumn. She argued that it had been dominated by “woke” identity politics, downplayed the threat of Islamist extremism, and “indoctrinated” students to believe there was no moral difference between terrorists and the democracies they attacked.
Stanley also said that an unnamed lecturer had described the writer Douglas Murray and the podcaster Joe Rogan as “far right”, demanding they should be “suppressed”. A few days after it was posted, Murray issued a series of tweets to his near-million social media followers accusing Neumann of being the offending academic. This was repeated by the Times, which also falsely claimed that Neumann was director of the course.
Neumann insisted in a letter to the paper that other lecturers included former heads of MI5 and GCHQ, that he was a “centre-right liberal” who was “highly critical of cancel culture”, and that he had never called for Murray or anyone else to be censored.
However, the damage had been done. The then-security minister Tom Tugendhat announced a Government review of “biased” civil servant training, and Neumann faced demands for his resignation, along with a torrent of threats. One of his detractors called him a “Jew-hating scumbag”. Others accused him of being “Nazi-influenced” and a “terrorist” funded by Islamists.
Some days after stating that Neumann had directed the course, the Times issued a correction on this point. Although he was a department professor, his involvement extended to giving a lecture and Q&A. But everything else — Stanley’s article, several pieces in the Times and innumerable social media posts — remains online. “I was in a state of panic,” Neumann told me this week. “I knew I had not said these things, but how could I possibly prove it?”
Recollections, as Buckingham Palace once noted, may vary. But the curious thing about Stanley’s memories of the course is that when both King’s College and the Foreign Office conducted inquiries, they could not find anyone who shared them.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe