Ruth Padel and John Walsh: was it him?

Big scandal around the election of Ruth Padel as Oxford poetry professor. The rival to “Paddle” – as Kirsty Young called her on Desert Island Discs – was the great poet Derek Walcott. Somebody circulated 100 potential voters with photocopies from a 1984 book describing the advances that Walcott made to two women students when he was at Harvard in 1982.

As a result, Walcott withdrew from the election, and Paddle got the job.

In the Sunday Telegraph (17 May) Padel is quoted denying as “ridiculous” claims by a former ~Professor of Poetry (not named) that she had colluded with John Walsh, “a friend and newspaper columnist” to do this. She said: “I used to know John 10 years ago and I see him once a year at parties”.

Walsh is a columnist for the Independent. On 28 April he wrote a deplorably partisan column for the paper. He declared himself a supporter of Padel, and then took a hatchet to Walcott, reprising the 1982 allegations, which were set out in a book called The Lecherous Professor published in 1984. The book is not about Walcott – he features on pages 29-33 and again briefly on p. 36.

Walsh’s cynical column does exactly what the 100 anonymous envelopes did.

So do we have anything but Padel’s word that it wasn’t him?

Some irony was introduced by a Sunday Times piece by the mischievous Sian Griffiths (17 May again), claiming it’s widely known that a Padel poem called “Home Cooking”, which ends with a fuck on the kitchen table after a couple have glazed a Sainsbury’s free-range duck, is about John Walsh. “She did not deny Walsh was the lover”, the ST writes.

Walsh is one of the weaker brethren among columnists, and it’s always been a surprise that he was once literary editor of the Sunday Times. Perhaps that’s why the paper’s journalists are so well-informed about his kitchen activities.

All Sunday’s papers write against Walsh and whoever sent the Walcott photocopies. All, that is, except Emily Dugan in the Independent on Sunday – she contrives to write the story without mentioning him once.

In the Observer Catherine Bennett directs some well-deserved sarcasm towards Walsh (17 May). But she makes a point nobody else has the courage or knowledge to make: Padel is “a mediocre versifier”. That is absolutely right– she’s certainly not in the Carol Ann Duffy class.

Oxford’s decision is a disaster. Ruth Padel is a weak poet – “Home Cooking”, as a subject, suggests that – and she hasn’t got anything interesting to say beyond 600 words. An hour’s lecture won’t amount to much. She’s a conventional thinker, a nineteenth-century leftover. She lives off the boring fact that she is Charles Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter. To her credit, she sounded genuinely upset by Walcott’s withdrawal.

If she thinks the activities of her ex-lover Walsh have “poisoned” her appointment, why doesn’t she just resign?

Come on, Ruth: you’re not going to win the Nobel, as Walcott did. There’s still time to get out.