The police’s shameful role in the Jason Arday affair

Public confidence in policing seems to be dwindling by the day. London’s Metropolitan Police, in particular, is looking less like a guardian of law and order than a bloated bureaucracy itching to police the boundaries of ‘respectable’ opinion.

The latest blow to public trust arrives on the back of the Jason Arday affair. In 2025, Jack Grove, a journalist at Times Higher Education, was investigating allegations that the then Cambridge professor had plagiarised parts of his PhD, and contacted him to offer him the right of reply. In other words, a journalist in the higher-education sector was checking details and putting difficult questions to a prominent academic. In a sane democracy, that isn’t suspicious conduct – it is the job description of a journalist.

Yet soon afterwards, the Met opened an investigation into Grove on suspicion of ‘harassing’ the academic. Grove says officers also instructed him to make no further contact with Arday because his enquiries had affected the professor’s ‘mental health’.

During my two decades in policing, asking an individual to leave someone alone because they were getting upset was never part of any training package. But the Arday story gets worse. After four months, detectives concluded there was no case to answer. They contacted Grove in order to notify him that he was no longer under investigation, only to find out that nobody had initially informed him that he was under investigation – so they couldn’t even do that properly.

Such absurdity and ineptitude would be comic were they not so concerning. One might have thought that the police had enough to occupy their time without treating legitimate reporting as a case for detectives. But this is what institutional activism within the police looks like. Burglary and robbery are shrugged at, disorder tolerated, and yet a reporter asking awkward questions is apparently enough to trigger the machinery of the state. The message is brutally simple – offend the wrong sensibilities, trespass on the wrong protected terrain and the police will come knocking.

Incidents like this are no longer aberrations. This is merely the latest in a long list of occasions where the police have intervened in areas of life that shouldn’t concern them. Their priorities are all over the place. High-ranking officers are fluent in every fashionable orthodoxy, but they become strangely tongue-tied when we ask why burglaries go unsolved, anti-social behaviour is indulged and the streets feel unsafe.

This matters because British policing rests on consent. Yes, the notion of consent is nebulous, but it is the only reason the police possess any moral authority. The public accepts police power because it believes that power will be used impartially, proportionately and in defence of common liberties. Once people conclude that policing has become culturally captured or openly hostile to mainstream opinion, that authority will leak away.

The growing public distrust of the police hasn’t emerged from nowhere. For many Britons who have long been instinctively pro-police, recent controversies have made that loyalty harder to maintain. They look at the wholly avoidable tragedy of Henry Nowak, the enthusiasm for recording ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’ and the embrace of fashionable ideological causes, and they understandably ask the obvious question: whose side are the police on?

The investigation into Grove deepens that distrust because it strikes at a liberty that should be non-negotiable. A free press isn’t only free when its questions are soft, soothing or pre-approved by the intelligentsia. Journalism involves pressure, persistence and asking questions the powerful and the thin-skinned would rather dodge. That isn’t harassment; it is democracy in action.

Just because the investigation into Grove’s actions didn’t lead anywhere, the police still caused damage by launching it. It acted as a warning to every other reporter tempted to dig where ‘polite’ society would rather they didn’t – in this case, into Jason Arday’s academic work. That is why the Met’s conduct cannot be brushed aside as a harmless mistake.

Met commissioner Mark Rowley has admitted, yet again, that his officers made an error. He said that any potential investigation into Grove should have been screened out as not requiring police action. But the very fact that it wasn’t is an indictment of modern policing. The employee who first looked into this should have realised immediately that it wasn’t worthy of police action. But instead, the officer either genuinely thought this constituted an offence, or that failing to act upon it would have caused him or her to be dragged before a misconduct board. Either way, it is symptomatic of the ideological capture of what should be an impartial institution.

Scotland Yard is losing its way. It has become a danger to the very liberties it is supposed to protect. If a police force adopts an activist posture – treating the taking of offence, distress, reputational embarrassment or ideological sensitivity as matters for law enforcement – it becomes inevitable the public will turn.

The Met might imagine this episode is over because Grove is no longer being investigated and Arday has resigned. It is not. The real case now is against the culture and leadership of an institution that, wilfully or otherwise, mistook journalistic scrutiny for wrongdoing. On that charge, they are guilty.

Paul Birch is a former police officer and counter-terrorism specialist. You can read his Substack here.