not able, not allowed, to talk to the press.
I was not permitted to explain what was
meant by moral, scandalous or disgraceful. So
you’re turned into public enemy number one.
The vast majority of your governing-body
colleagues are just going around shaking their
heads, saying, ‘Oh, it’s all very sad, but it’s
very, very difficult. He’s done some terrible
things. We can’t say any more, but if you knew
how difficult it was and how tough it was,
then you’d agree with us.’ And when people
pressed and asked, ‘Well, what are these
terrible things the dean has done?’ they turn
out to be extraordinary. ‘Well, he has looked
at his iPhone during a meeting.’ That was one
of the terrible things I’d done.”
The two-week tribunal, chaired by Sir
Andrew Smith, a former High Court judge,
was held in lawyers’ chambers the following
June, 2019. Percy was on the stand for four
days. One bizarre exchange concerned
whether Percy had “demeaned” a colleague
by using the word “specious”. The judge
returned after a coffee break with a dictionary
and explained it simply meant something
superficially plausible but wrong. But Percy’s
legal bill was now more than £250,000, and
Christ Church’s more than £1.25 million.
In August, the Percys were on holiday in
Switzerland when news arrived that Smith had
rejected all 27 charges against him. He had
some minor criticisms but they “fell far short
of being good cause for dismissal”.
“A good day in Switzerland. Lovely. Huge
relief,” Percy recalls. “And at that point I’m
thinking to myself, ‘Well, we’ll go and we’ll
start to make things work.’ ”
As autumn term 2019 began, however,
Christ Church made it clear it was not going
to repay Percy’s legal bills, a major worry for
the dean. (In the end, Percy’s settlement left
ample money to repay his debts.) The censors
meanwhile kept Smith’s findings – and the
records of those malicious emails – out
of sight of the rest of the governing body.
In December 2019, it passed a vote of no
confidence in Percy.
“I probably was at breaking point, I think,
now I look back on it, but I came through that
in the early part of 2020 and began to regain
my strength. There’d been a couple of attempts
at mediation and we went into one of those
periods again in early March 2020. What
I didn’t know at the time was that there was,
in effect, another plot out there to kill me.”
This was the series of third-party
safeguarding complaints that preceded
Hairgate, the issues that the Church of
England would decide he had handled
properly. While Percy waited for the ruling,
the censors found more trivial causes for
complaint. That March, burglars escaped with
three valuable Old Master paintings from the
Christ Church art gallery. The censors (notThe Times Magazine 49Late one December afternoon, Percy had
returned from the funeral of his brother-in-
law when he received a phone call from the
porter’s lodge to say there was a problem in
a Christ Church accommodation. A woman
student had stabbed a young man in the leg
with a bread knife. Police took her away. The
following afternoon, Percy was called again
and told she had broken back into her room
and cut her foot. It was left to Percy to get her
out of the shower, dried and dressed.
“We were left entirely alone to deal with
this. It’s only 24 hours since my brother-in-
law’s funeral so I’m not best pleased, it’s fair
to say,” Percy says.
Determined to reform Christ Church
safeguarding, Percy called for job descriptions
to be drawn up of the censors’ duties. He
was met with resistance, particularly from
the unofficial committee of former censors
who seemed to resent his interference.
Nevertheless, a year on safeguarding protocols
were established (Christ Church, Percy says,
is now as safe as anywhere else for a student).
Relations had worsened, however, because
Percy had also asked for a review of salaries of
the four senior officers of Christ Church: the
dean’s among them. The word went round that
the dean was greedy for a pay rise.
He was earning around £80,000 and living
in the deanery Charles I resided in during the
English Civil War. What was he complaining
about? He says the Christ Church dean’s salary
had fallen into the bottom quarter percentile
for heads of Oxford colleges whereas it had
been in the top quarter (the dean also had a
cathedral to run, after all). “This is a decision
that needs justification and it needs to be open,
transparent and honest and subject to scrutiny.”
Emails showed just how annoyed senior
figures at Christ Church were. David Hine,
at the time “senior ex-censor”, wrote in 2017
that Percy had a “low-grade mind” and was
“spiteful towards tutors and exC[ensor]s.” He
was a “creep”, “nasty and stupid”: “He’s got
to go.” His colleague, an investments expert
called Karl Sternberg, wrote of Percy in
January 2018, “He’s incorrigible and thick
and a narcissist... [T]he college has a serious
problem unless he is forced out.” In a
recondite joke he wrote the same month,
“Please, please ex-Censors – get rid of him.
Just think of the Inspector Morse episode we
could make when his wrinkly withered body is
found at Osney Lock.”
In October 2018, Percy was in South
Korea to deliver a lecture. Overnight he
received a series of documents from Hine
informing him that he had been accused
under college statutes of “immoral, scandalous
and disgraceful conduct”.
“I was devastated because I couldn’t
think how anything in terms of me trying
to raise awareness about proper process,
accountability, organisation and the like
could remotely be construed as conduct
of an immoral, scandalous and disgraceful
nature. What they were doing was using that
language to destroy me.”
The governing body voted to set up an
internal tribunal to adjudicate on his conduct
in the pay dispute.
“I was petrified of losing my reputation,
my house. I had nowhere else to live. I wasIT WAS SAID HE HAD A ‘LOW-GRADE MIND’,
WAS ‘NASTY AND STUPID’: ‘HE’S GOT TO GO’
Leaving the college for the last time,
with his wife, Emma, and Lyra, April 26