A man stands at a rally in Trafalgar Square, ranting that Jason Arday was murdered in a ‘lynching’ and ‘public assassination’ by ‘rabid wolves’ and ‘dogs of hell’ who had decided that ‘Jason doesn’t deserve to be alive’.

Some rabble-rouser from the lower shallows of race activism? No, or at least not solely. The man who said these inflammatory words is a peer of the realm and the principal of Homerton College, Cambridge: Simon Woolley, Lord Woolley of Woodford. His behaviour at the rally last week, surely unprecedented for someone in those roles, is further evidence that unsuitable appointments at Cambridge did not begin with Jason Arday.

I’ve known Woolley since the mid-Noughties, when he was a key member of the circle around Lee Jasper, the then race adviser to the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone. Jasper resigned in 2008, holing Livingstone’s re-election campaign below the waterline, after a series of stories by me raised questions over hundreds of thousands of pounds in City Hall money which appeared to be paid to companies run by him and his friends which appeared to do little or no work in return. Jasper claimed at the time to be a victim of a racist and relentless media campaign.

Like Arday, Woolley is, in my opinion, underqualified for the job he has been given

Jasper was subsequently cleared of criminal wrongdoing. Nevertheless, an independent report commissioned by the Greater London Authority found he had apparently insisted on an organisation of which he was a patron, Brixton Base, being involved in a particular project in spite of it not having the necessary skills or experience required. The independent report found this to be ‘entirely inappropriate’ in light of his position.

Although, unlike other Jasper cronies, I didn’t accuse Woolley of personal gain or wrongdoing, he was a director of at least two of the suspect companies, Brixton Base and the Black Londoners Forum. As my original story about them in the Evening Standard put it:

Brixton Base, whose patron is Mr Jasper… has received £287,000 from the London Development Agency [LDA; a City Hall agency] over the past two years for ‘premises’ – even though it has occupied an LDA-owned building throughout that time and was charged no rent in the first year, according to mayoral answers to the London Assembly… The LDA paid at least a further £230,000 to Brixton Base to equip it as a ‘creative training hub’ for the black community, with a film studio, and to run three short creative training projects.

However, the director of one of those projects, the film-maker Shango B’Song of ITS Cine, told the Standard that he in fact financed the studio and nearly all the spending on the project out of his own pocket – and saw only £8,000 of the LDA grant given to pay for it. ‘From the very beginning of the course, Brixton Base’s attitude towards our staff and students was unprofessional, dishonest, abusive and sometimes threatening,’ said Mr B’Song. One of the directors of Brixton Base [not Woolley], ‘reminded me on numerous occasions that [if I complained] they had ‘some gangster friends who would break me up.’ …

In a letter to the LDA, dated 20 October 2006 and obtained by the Standard, nine of the students on the ITS Cine course complained of ‘attempted intimidation’ by Brixton Base staff – who, they said, also lied to funders and potential funders in their presence that Brixton Base had paid for the studio facilities….

The LDA took no action on either complaint but instead paid a further £390,000 to Brixton Base. The Standard has been leaked a series of emails between Mr Jasper and senior staff of the LDA which lay bare Mr Jasper’s key role in protecting the project. In June last year, even before Mr B’Song’s and his students’ complaints had been received, LDA officials had severe doubts about Brixton Base and wanted to evict the organisation from its building.

However, in an email seen by the Standard, Mr Jasper ordered the LDA’s senior director, Tony Winterbottom, to ‘ensure that this action [the eviction] is withdrawn immediately and ensure I am consulted on all major decisions affecting [Brixton Base]’. We have also seen emails which show Mr Jasper’s close involvement in the project’s funding applications.

Despite receiving at least £535,000 to date in LDA grants, Brixton Base’s website remains ‘under construction’ and repeated phone calls by the Standard to its listed number over a period of several weeks were never answered…

The Black Londoners Forum, based in the same building as Brixton Base…has received at least a further £291,000 directly from the Mayor. The Standard has seen the official funding agreement for £53,000 of this money which imposes extraordinarily few obligations on the Black Londoners Forum in return for its grant.

The agreement says that in return for the BLF’s money all the campaigning it has to do is ‘support an online petition’ against attacks on asylum seekers. This currently contains 97 signatures.

The BLF’s real function appears to be to offer enthusiastic support for the Mayor. Its website republishes mayoral press releases word-for-word as its own and it responds to mayoral consultations with glowing praise of his policies. This is then cited by Mr Livingstone as ‘evidence’ that his policies are supported by the black community.

At the time, Jasper insisted that he did ‘not get involved’ in grant funding decisions. ‘I don’t take a day-to-day overview of what’s happening at Brixton Base,’ he said. ‘I’m just the patron, the champion.’

Woolley was part of the supporting claque regularly rolled out by Livingstone to attack his opponents as racist and defend the mayor against any race-related controversy. One example was when Livingstone hosted the anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi (some kinds of bigot are allowed, it would seem). During the grants scandal Woolley was also the key media defender of Jasper, who he calls his ‘hero and mentor’ and with whom he still maintains close links. He used the same tactics as he has with journalistic critics of Arday, accusing me of trying to murder Jasper with a campaign of lies. My peers disagreed, giving my stories the top award in British print journalism that year, and Jasper, happily, is still with us.

After taking a lower profile for a while, Woolley resurfaced in the 2010s, conveniently just as Theresa May was desperately looking for any black figure who would deal with her after the Windrush scandal. Woolley wound up with first a knighthood and then, literally three months later, a peerage. (With these safely in the bag, he started attacking the Tories again.)

Like Jason Arday, Woolley is not negligible or without achievement. He began, in his own words, as a ‘street hustler’ and West End ticket tout, then worked as a salesman before climbing the activist ladder and getting a first degree, then a master’s, as a mature student. He did one term as a commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission and for many years ran Operation Black Vote (OBV), a cross-party campaign to get more black people into politics. He’s perfectly capable of coming across as reasonable and moderate. Several Labour and Tory MPs and activists are very grateful to him for the support he and OBV gave them (and some will no doubt be deployed to attack me now as a racist for questioning Woolley’s meteoric rise.)

But, like Arday, Woolley is, in my opinion, underqualified for the job he has been given. The advert for the Homerton principal demanded ‘an outstanding record of leadership and achievement in their field’. Woolley’s predecessor, Geoff Ward, was a lecturer, then professor, then department head, with an extensive academic publication record, as well as a published poet and novelist.

True, non-academics are often appointed to lead colleges at Cambridge. But the university’s other current non-academic heads of house – former ambassadors and permanent secretaries, a former head of the BBC World Service, a former army general, a former chief executive of a top-ten charity, a former chief medical officer – have without exception led more people, achieved more, or attained higher rank than Woolley.

Perhaps conscious of this, Homerton’s announcement of Woolley’s arrival claimed 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. It is not clear whether this is an Arday-style CV embellishment or something made up by the college rather than Woolley. Both he and Homerton declined to answer questions about the matter this week. Woolley does give the correct position in his subsequent memoirs.

The statement that Woolley was the first black man to head any Oxbridge college became the top news line for the BBC and others. This was strictly correct, but perhaps also misleading: he was, in fact, the sixth person of colour to lead a college and the second black college head, at Cambridge alone. The others were black women, or people of South Asian or Arab descent. Cambridge’s first non-white college head, Michael Atiyah at Trinity, was appointed in 1990, more than 30 years before Woolley. The difference is that Atiyah and the others were not activists but people of real distinction, one of them a Nobel prize winner.

Woolley played a key part not just in defending but also creating Jason Arday. Arday ‘came to my office at Operation Black Vote some 15 years ago,’ he said in his Trafalgar Square speech. ‘We nurtured him through his leadership journey.’ After the plagiarism row blew up, Woolley was the lead signatory on the notorious Jolyon Maugham letter which claimed the allegations against Arday were ‘baseless’ and racist and praised his ‘remarkable scholarship’. He was the only Cambridge college head not to withdraw his name after further evidence of the allegations’ truth emerged (though interestingly, he did withdraw his Homerton affiliation. I asked the college whether they had asked him to do this; they declined to respond. Woolley and Homerton also declined to make any response at all to the charges in this article, which were put to them on Wednesday.

Part of the responsibility of academic leaders – even if they are not themselves academics – is to promote truthful and honest enquiry. Claiming that Jason Arday was murdered, that the questions about his work and CV were solely motivated by racism, or that anyone wanted him dead, is not just untrue but profoundly irresponsible, stoking racial grievance and tension. Simon Woolley is not fit to lead a Cambridge college.