The Misan Harriman Smear Campaign

Misan Harriman is the chair of the Southbank Centre, a major publicly-funded arts institution. He is also Black, Nigerian-born, Oscar-nominated, openly pro-Palestine, and — most relevantly — a Royal Photographic Society honoree whose 2024 image Brothers in Protest shows a Muslim man and a Jewish man on the Thames embankment together, calling for a Gaza ceasefire.

In the space of five days in May 2026, the Telegraph ran two attack pieces against him. Both by the same arts correspondent. Both built on viral social-media distortions. Together they form a coordinated editorial line, not journalism.

Two Telegraph hit pieces in five days. Two distorted social-media posts. One Labour MP, one Reform-aligned politician, and one Holocaust charity CEO recruited to call for his sacking. Both of Harriman's posts factually defensible. Neither contained anything resembling antisemitism.

The campaign is not about what Harriman said. It is about what he stands for — and about who is allowed to lead a publicly-funded cultural institution while holding views the Telegraph dislikes.

The Telegraph's arts correspondent Craig Simpson published a piece on 6 May headlined that an Arts Council-funded venue chief had shared a Golders Green “conspiracy.”

What Harriman actually posted: he shared a post by Ayoub Khan MP and added a question — why had the press and the Metropolitan Police not reported a third victim on the same day who was Muslim?

That question was factually correct. Specifically:

• Essa Suleiman was charged with three counts of attempted murder, not two.
• The first victim, Ishmail Hussein, a Muslim man known to Suleiman for around 20 years, was stabbed in his Southwark flat that morning before Suleiman travelled to Golders Green.
• The Met Police's X post mentioned only “two men stabbed in Golders Green.” The fuller written statement buried Hussein in paragraph three under “Suleiman was also charged…”
• The BBC, Sky News, NPR, Deutsche Welle, and the Associated Press all omitted Hussein from headlines. Mehdi Hasan and Owen Jones flagged the erasure publicly.

Middle East Eye called the erasure the “ghost logic of Islamophobia.”

What the Telegraph buried: Harriman's first response to the attack, posted to Instagram the same day, expressed solidarity with the Jewish community and called antisemitism unacceptable. The Telegraph chose not to include it.

The piece then tee'd up the political payload: it cited Keir Starmer's recent attack on arts institutions “accused of antisemitism” and wheeled in Labour MP David Taylor, a backbench nobody, to suggest the Southbank Centre should “consider removing” Harriman from the board.

Question Islamophobic media framing → get rebranded as a Golders Green “conspiracy theorist” → get targeted for removal from a publicly-funded cultural role.

Four days later, the same correspondent ran the follow-up.

What actually happened:

• Harriman posted a 5 minute 40 second video on community-building in the aftermath of Reform's local election performance.
• Activist Heidi Bachram clipped a 57-second segment, stripped of context, and posted it claiming he compared Reform voters to the Holocaust.
• The line in question was a direct quotation from Susan Sontag (a Jewish-American writer): roughly 10% of any population is inherently cruel, 10% inherently merciful, 80% can be swayed in either direction. It is an observation about human behaviour. Not about Reform voters. Not about Nazis.
• Bachram blocked Harriman after posting. Harriman said it has put him and his family at risk.

The pile-on

• Karen Pollock CBE, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, amplified the clip and demanded explanation. Worth noting: Pollock herself has publicly compared the Holocaust to 7 October in The Guardian, and HET historically partnered with the then-Chief Rabbi and the Archbishop of Canterbury on visits framed around contemporary parallels. The “Holocaust uniqueness” line is selectively deployed.
• Robert Jenrick (Tory, now openly aligning with Reform-friendly rhetoric) called Harriman a “crass moron” and demanded he be removed from any taxpayer-funded role. Jenrick is currently under referral to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards over £100,000 in disputed foreign-linked donations. Convenient distraction material.
• The Telegraph then ran the Jenrick quote as its second article in the same week.

The Telegraph piece didn't stay in the Telegraph. Within the same news cycle, three more UK outlets ran versions of the same misframing — reproducing the 17% out-of-context clip as fact and presenting Misan Harriman as having compared Reform voters to Nazi supporters.

The pattern matters. A misframing that ran in one paper can be dismissed as an editorial mistake. A misframing that ran across four UK papers within hours is a coordinated reproduction of a viral social-media clip, not journalism. Each outlet bears individual editorial responsibility for what it published.

Four outlets, one misrepresentation, one news cycle. The Telegraph supplied the framing; GB News, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express picked it up unchallenged.

Each of the three syndicated pieces is the same Clause 1 (Accuracy) breach: a 17% out-of-context clip presented as the whole. Of the three, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are IPSO-registered and can be complained about directly to the regulator. GB News is regulated by Ofcom rather than IPSO; for that outlet the complaint goes direct to editorial.

Each of the three syndicated pieces is the same Clause 1 (Accuracy) breach: a 17% out-of-context clip presented as the whole. Of the three, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are IPSO-registered and can be complained about directly to the regulator. GB News is regulated by Ofcom rather than IPSO; for that outlet the complaint goes direct to editorial.

Phase 1 was clip-and-distort. Phase 2 is a saturation operation. In one week The Times hit the same target from four editorial positions, and the Evening Standard then carried the same framing to a separate-owner masthead. The trigger was a manufactured one: an open letter The Times itself solicited and published, then reported by The Times as a news event.

The signatories. Former Southbank trustee David Kershaw, former BBC director of television Danny Cohen, Conservative peer Lord Roberts of Belgravia, and producers Leo Pearlman and Neil Blair. A counter-letter has passed 21,000 signatures naming this a right-wing smear campaign.

The four positions. Each one a separate editorial choice. Each one a separate Clause 1 (Accuracy) line.

1. (i) News, the keystone. “Southbank Centre chairman urged to quit over ‘divisive agenda’” reports the open letter as a newsworthy public intervention. The letter’s orchestrated provenance, solicited and published by The Times itself, is not made adequately clear. That provenance is material to how a reader would weigh the letter’s significance. Clause 1(i) misleading presentation; Clause 1(iv) failure to distinguish contested opinion from fact.
2. (ii) Political pressure vector. “Culture secretary urged to investigate Southbank chairman” reports the Shadow Culture Secretary calling on the Culture Secretary, with the contested characterisation (a Holocaust or Nazi comparison) reported as settled fact and the Golders Green context omitted. Clause 1(i); Clause 1(ii) (publicly disputed, not corrected with due prominence).
3. (iii) Regulatory pressure vector. A leading article, ‘The Times view’, headlined “Charity Commission must investigate the Southbank Centre chairman” directs a statutory regulator to act against a named individual, on a factual premise that is at minimum materially contested. A newspaper is free to editorialise and campaign; an editorial calling on a regulator to act against a named individual should not rest on a disputed factual foundation. Clause 1(i).
4. (iv) Signed comment, the adjective machine. “Misan Harriman’s crass opinions harm the institution he is meant to lead” standardises “crass” as the cross-outlet adjective and embeds the contested factual claim within an otherwise comment-protected piece. The columnist is entitled to a low opinion; the protection for comment does not extend to inaccurate statements of fact embedded within it. Clause 1(i).

(v) Cross-title amplification. Once the Times-laundered letter became a news event, the Evening Standard ran “Calls for Southbank chairman to quit over ‘divisive’ social media posts.” Same contested characterisation, presented as settled fact. Same Golders Green omission. Separate owner, separate masthead, same Clause 1(i) failure.

One target. One week. News, news, leader, comment, amplification. The architecture is not a coincidence; it is a saturation operation, and every leg of it is filable under Clause 1.

The underlying factual basis, again, for the record. The remark characterised across this coverage as a Holocaust or Nazi comparison was a paraphrase of an observation by the writer Susan Sontag, delivered within a roughly five-minute video about community cohesion following the local elections. Susan Sontag was a Jewish-American author. The observation concerns general human behaviour and is not a comparison of Reform UK voters, or any group, to Nazis or to the Holocaust. A 57-second extract was circulated in isolation from that context.

A funding-figure caveat readers should know. The open letter cites “£18m in government funding last year”; earlier coverage referenced ~£10m from Arts Council England. These are different measures; conflating them is its own factual error.

What this campaign is alleging, and what it is not. A complaint to IPSO is, by definition, an allegation that the Editors’ Code was breached. No IPSO ruling has been made on any of these articles. The Phase 2 complaints are filed in the complainant’s name, anchored to specific demonstrable points under Clause 1, and addressed to the coverage, never to any individual journalist.

Harriman is targeted because he is the wrong kind of public figure, in the wrong job, at the wrong moment.

1. He is Black, Nigerian-born, Oscar-nominated, and has Sussex connections. The Telegraph mentioned the Meghan-Harry friendship three times in the first article. That is not incidental.
2. He chairs a major publicly-funded cultural institution. That makes him a high-value pressure point against the British cultural sector, which the right has been trying to reshape for years.
3. He has used his platform consistently for Palestine, Gaza, Iran, and BLM. His 2024 image Brothers in Protest — a Muslim and a Jewish man calling for a Gaza ceasefire together — is the exact opposite of the “islands of rage” framing the right needs.
4. Starmer's antisemitism-emergency framing post-Golders Green created an opening. The PM raised the temperature. The Telegraph is using that temperature to burn a target it has wanted for years.
5. He is a test case. If Harriman can be removed for a factually-correct post and a quoted line from Susan Sontag, the precedent locks in. Every other arts leader knows exactly what is off-limits going forward.

1. The Golders Green attack had three victims, one Muslim. This is on the charge sheet. The Met's own X post omitted it. Harriman's question was journalism, not conspiracy.
2. Harriman condemned the antisemitism of the Golders Green attack on day one. The Telegraph chose not to mention this.
3. The “Holocaust comparison” was a direct quotation from Susan Sontag, a Jewish writer, about human behaviour in general, in a video about community-building. Not about Reform voters. Not about Nazis.
4. The clip was 57 seconds out of 340 — 17% of the video presented as the whole.
5. Heidi Bachram blocked Harriman after posting, preventing him from defending himself on the same thread. Standard pile-on engineering.
6. The same Telegraph defends “cancel culture” victims weekly, including a London Kanye West gig dropped over Hitler praise. The principle is selectively applied.
7. Jenrick, who demanded Harriman's removal as a “crass moron,” is himself under parliamentary referral over four £25,000 donations of disputed permissibility.

• Don't argue antisemitism. Argue media literacy. The Telegraph is laundering a 17% clip as a Holocaust comparison and a factual question as a “conspiracy.” That's the story.
• Name the pattern, not the personalities. Two articles, same correspondent, five days, both built on social-media distortions, both calling for removal from a publicly-funded role. That is a coordinated editorial line, not journalism.
• Use Harriman's own image. Brothers in Protest: a Muslim man and a Jewish man on the embankment calling for a ceasefire together. Let the image do the work.
• Point to the Muslim victim. Ishmail Hussein has a name. Every time the smear is repeated, repeat his name. The erasure is the story behind the smear.
• Name what it is. A campaign to push a Black, pro-Palestine, Oscar-nominated public figure out of a leadership role in British cultural life — dressed up as moral outrage.