So perhaps you could give us a flavour of how universities reacted to those comments.

I think it's important to explain the context in which that question was asked, because Malcolm Press, he is the president of Universities UK and the vice chancellor of Manchester Metropolitan University.

asked Chris McDonald explicitly where he saw funding for the arts and humanities in terms of research.

And Chris McDonald was quite explicit in that he didn't really see this as a priority for him.

He thought that the responsibility for that actually lay more with another department, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

I don't think that's actually correct.

But Chris McDonald, actually, in his speech, had made it quite clear that he saw himself as standing up for science more than anything.

AI,

He says legal threats prevented them from publishing at the time.

Well, I'd been getting multiple tip-offs from academics saying something was happening here with, uh, Professor Arday's work.

Initially, I ignored the first tip-off 'cause I didn't quite see what the story was.

But a year later, actually two years later, another professor came to me and said, "Have a look at this thing with his paper.

Something's not quite right here." So I started looking into the paper, and I thought there was something odd about it, but then I started looking into his life and, uh, his other work.

And I began to see these sort of strange stories about his, uh, running achievements, his charity fundraising, and they just, they just didn't seem to stack up or really there was no evidence there to suggest he'd done that.

And so, yeah, I was-

You once were.

When did you first start looking into Jason Arday and what first made you think there might be a story?

Well, I've been getting multiple tip-offs from academics saying something was happening here with Professor Ade's work.

Initially, I ignored the first tip-off because I didn't quite see what the story was.

But a year later, actually two years later, another professor came to me and said, have a look at this thing with his paper.

Something's not quite right here.

So I started looking into the paper and I thought there was something odd about it.

But then I started looking into his life and his other work.

You once were.