Durham has become the focus of anger from both sides of the political spectrum. Students and academics try to explain why its campus skirmishes keep spilling out into the tabloids
It was 3 December 2021, and South College, Durham University, was having its Christmas formal. “Formals happen every week here,” says Miatta Pemberton (not her real name), who is in her second year at the college. “It’s a longstanding Durham thing. You put on a gown that cost £60, or, if you’re like me, you buy it off eBay for £20.” For a special occasion, it would be normal to have a speaker and announce them in advance. By 5pm, the speaker hadn’t been announced, and Pemberton found out who it was by chance from the college’s vice-principal, Lee Worden. She couldn’t immediately place the person; she just knew she’d heard the name “for all the wrong reasons”.
About 15 to 20 students more familiar with Rod Liddle’s work in the Spectator and the Sunday Times (sample headline on one of his columns from 2018: “I’m identifying as a young, black, trans chihuahua”), walked out before he’d started speaking. As they did so, Tim Luckhurst, the college principal who had invited Liddle, shouted: “At South College, we value freedom of speech,” and “Pathetic!”. So the mood wasn’t great, but there were still upwards of 180 students in the hall as Liddle stood up to speak. He began by saying he was disappointed not to see any sex workers there, a reference to a controversy from the previous month, when the students’ union was attacked for offering safety training to students involved in sex work. The story was picked up by the tabloid press, which mobilised the opinion wing of the Daily Mail, which then brought in the then further education minister, Michelle Donelan, who accused the union of “legitimising a dangerous industry which thrives on the exploitation of women”. If you were a culture-war correspondent looking for the frontline, you’d go to Durham: it is where things kick off.
