The chair of England’s university regulator, who was criticised for participating in a conference in Hungary on the same platform as a notorious far-right journalist accused of antisemitism, has said he did not know who he was appearing alongside.
James Wharton, chair of the Office for Students (OfS), addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) via a video message last Friday, on the same day as Zsolt Bayer, a talkshow host who has called Jews “stinking excrement”, referred to Roma as “animals”, and used racial epithets to describe Black people.
In a letter to staff at the OfS, Lord Wharton, who led Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign, said he didn’t know that Bayer was also speaking at the event. “Even if I had known,” he went on, “I had never heard of him.”
