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.

In her article, Stanley — who had left the Foreign Office after less than two years by the time it was published — said she found the course “a deeply, existentially depressing experience”, which consisted of “politically biased, anti-government training” that was so extreme it represented “a national security risk”.

This is difficult to square with a text she sent to another of the lecturers, Dr Rajan Basra. Seen by UnHerd, it read: “Thanks for your lecture [at] Kings College yesterday, it was very insightful. Tomorrow is my last day on the course and I’ve really enjoyed it!”

King’s College concluded its internal investigation first. By the end of January, this had confirmed that the names of Rogan and Murray did not appear in any of the course lecture slides, and that no one who had been present could remember them being mentioned by Neumann or anyone else.

A second inquiry was led by Matthew Dixon, the Foreign Office’s principal analyst on international terrorism. In an email to Neumann sent at the end of June, he said he had found that “none of the King’s staff on the course recalled you, the participants or other lecturers making many of the statements listed in the article.”

Dixon also spoke to many of course’s students. “These conversations gave me confidence that the substance of the article was based on a mix of comments taken out of context and falsehoods,” he said. “Comments about the moral relativity of terrorism were a clear distortion, deliberate or otherwise, of what was said […] In consultation with colleagues, I therefore determined that there was no reason to question our relationship with KCL or to discontinue offering the course.” He also found no evidence for the claims that Neumann suggested Right-wing voices should be silenced.

A Foreign Office spokesman issued a further statement in an email to UnHerd this week: “An examination of these claims concluded they were unsubstantiated, and staff continue to attend the course as an insight into academic counter terrorism trends.”

Alan Johnson, the editor of Fathom, who cut his political teeth at the now-defunct Trotskyite publication Socialist Organiser before going to work at the pro-Israel advocacy group BICOM, did not respond to a request for comment.

Stanley, however, sent an email in which she claimed that she sent an appreciative text to Basra because she had found “his particular lecture insightful”. As for telling him she had “really enjoyed” the course as a whole, she wrote: “Automatic niceties regarding the course overall were reflective of my English sensibility towards politeness.” She said she had conveyed her true feelings in a voicemail to a friend “with whom she could speak more freely”.

She did not try to explain why no one else could recall the other statements cited in her piece in Fathom, but insisted: “I stand by everything I wrote in my article.”

Neumann appears to have been vindicated, but admits it will take time to get over the experience. “I guess you can imagine what it’s like for a German who’s devoted time and given money to Jewish causes to be accused of being a terrorist and antisemite,” he said. “It’s awful.”

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David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

DavidRoseUK

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