Comment Central: The 10 worst smear campaigns

The University of Oxford may be left without a candidate for the post of Professor of Poetry after the resignation of Ruth Padel in a row over an e-mail smear campaign against her main rival.

Padel admitted yesterday that she had been “naive and silly” when she e-mailed journalists alerting them to allegations of sexual harassment made against the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott dating back to 1982. Walcott withdrew after the claims were sent anonymously to 100 Oxford dons.

Both Padel and Walcott said that they would not run for the 300-year-old position when Oxford reopened nominations in October. The only other candidate from the last election, Arvind Mehrotra, told The Times that he too was not sure that he wanted “to go through the whole process again”.

Speaking at the Hay Festival, Padel insisted that she played no part in spreading the dossier of claims about Walcott around Oxford, but said that she had sent the e-mails because some students had told her that they were concerned about his past.

“Those e-mails were naive and silly of me,” she said. “I do not believe it was wrong, but it was a bad error of judgment . . . I really regret that it could be misconstrued as evidence that I had participated in a large-scale campaign.”

Padel, who resigned nine days after becoming the first woman to be elected to the post, said that it would not be a good idea to run again. “I don’t think now I could have a clean beginning because I think people wouldn’t believe in me,” she said.

Walcott also said he would not put his name forward. He said that he did not want to revisit “that awful business”, adding: “I don’t think I’ll stand again.” When he pulled out he complained of being the victim of “a low and degrading attempt at character assassination”.

Mehrotra said that he needed more time to consider his position, adding: “I have my own writing commitments. The lectures would take an awful lot of time. It’s a pretty tough job.”

Padel made her first public statement about her resignation at a hastily arranged press conference at Hay-on-Wye. In a rambling statement, notable for its absence of an apology, she repeatedly complained that her e-mails had been misconstrued.

In one of her e-mails, to a London Evening Standard journalist, she wrote that the book containing the allegations about Walcott, The Lecherous Professor, “might provide interesting copy on what Oxford wants from its professor”. In her statement yesterday, Padel insisted that she had “acted throughout in complete good faith”.

She added: “I can of course see that people can misconstrue those two isolated e-mails of mine as part of a large campaign I had nothing to do with.”

When asked at the press conference whether she wanted to apologise to Walcott, she said: “I do want to apologise to him. I can’t apologise for things I haven’t done and I didn’t do the mailshot thing, the big campaign. I apologise for anything I have done which can be misconstrued as being against him.”

She said that she had resigned after being told by university staff that “opinion within Oxford was bitterly divided”.

The five-year role, for which the professor is obliged to deliver 15 lectures, pays an annual stipend of £6,901.

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