The appalling hypocrisy of Peter Wilby

According to the ancient proverb, if you sit by the river for long enough you will see the body of your enemy float by. That happened to me earlier this week when I discovered the fate of Peter Wilby, a former editor of the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday. In 2018, when I was forced to resign from a government job over old tweets, Wilby wrote an article saying my public humiliation had come as no surprise to him. Apparently, I’d made a career out of ‘denigrating women, homosexuals, disabled people, ethnic minorities and anybody on benefits’, and ‘disgraced’ the memory of my dead father. ‘At one stage he was more or less addicted to both alcohol and pornography,’ he said.

That piece cut me to the quick. If you’re in the process of being cancelled – I ended up having to step down from four more positions that year – you read all your press coverage, desperately hoping someone is going to stick up for you. When I saw my name in the headline of Peter’s diary column in the New Statesman, my spirits soared. In addition to publishing various pieces of mine over the years, he had written a sympathetic article in the Guardian about my efforts to set up a free school. At last, I thought, a senior media figure who’s going to give me a fair hearing. So reading his little sermon was a bitter blow. It wasn’t just because I liked and respected Peter. It was the fact he had known my father, who died in 2002. It was like receiving a judgment from beyond the grave, delivered by proxy. I had ‘disgraced’ him.

You can imagine my astonishment, therefore, when I read last Saturday’s Times: ‘Peter Wilby: former Independent on Sunday editor sentenced over child sex images.’