My colleague, the paedophile

After a Cambridge professor was allowed to return to work having been suspended for, and then convicted of, possessing, making and distributing images of child pornography, Andy Martin objected

There is a sense at Cambridge of being exempt from the standards recognised by society at large (Getty/iStock)

Would you give a job to a convicted paedophile? No, neither would I, especially not as a teacher. Cambridge University thinks otherwise. The question is: why? I sometimes wonder: does he include his conviction on his CV?  Probably not. I just looked up his webpage: it doesn’t mention it there either. 

“Professor M” (as I will call him) is a colleague of mine at Cambridge. For around 10 years I’ve tried to forget about it, and then, quite recently, I got a letter addressed to him in my pigeon-hole and I thought: just hold on, he is not me, I am not him. He’s the paedophile, I’m not. The university seems oblivious to the difference.

I may be guilty of having kept quiet about it for too long. But the fact is I went to the trouble of setting out my objections to their decision all those years ago when he got his old job back. He had been swept up in a police paedophile unit operation, duly arrested, put on trial and convicted. He was found guilty of possessing, making and distributing child pornography, including images of babies, more than 1,000 photographs and videos of boys from two days old to teenagers, with some of them classified as “level 5”, referring to images involving bestiality or sadism.