The Jason Arday story is becoming a national scandal. What began as a vaguely amusing parable of our times, a schadenfreude-filled exposé of the left’s remarkable gullibility, has now morphed into something far more sinister. For now we learn that Scotland Yard attempted to silence a journalist who tried to expose Arday’s claims. In fact, they spent four months investigating him.
Even by the appallingly low standards of the Met, it is a startling revelation. When Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education, emailed Arday a series of questions about his academic record, officers told him to stop contacting the professor because his mental health had been affected. Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck (who don’t come cheap), who claimed Grove’s ‘apparent attack’ on their client ‘may be… racially motivated’.
The UK’s biggest police force attempted to shut down a journalistic investigation, apparently because the man at the centre of it played the race card
Let’s be really clear about what this means. The UK’s biggest police force attempted to shut down a journalistic investigation, apparently because the man at the centre of it played the race card. As Grove himself states, ‘I was just doing my job. Journalists should be free to ask questions of anyone, even star professors.’
And yet if we’ve learned anything from the Arday debacle, it is that asking questions is beyond the pale for the powers that be. At best, you’ll be accused of attempting ‘to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence’ – as a ‘solidarity letter’ organised by the left-wing pressure group the Good Law Project recently alleged. At worst, it’ll lead to a phone call from the Old Bill and legal threats from one of the country’s most expensive law firms.
The more you learn about the Arday affair the angrier you get. Angry about Grove being investigated by the Met for just doing his job. Angry about the academics who should have been promoted instead. But most of all angry about the craven capitulation of institution after institution when faced with the delusions of an apparent fantasist who had only one true talent: an ability to exploit their virtue-signalling vanity.
When doubts about Arday’s academic record first emerged, his defenders cried racism. And yet aren’t the real racists those who seemingly hold diverse academics to lower standards? In 2023, the BBC ran a piece in which Hilary Cremin, head of Cambridge’s education faculty, simpers in front of Arday on camera that ‘we are so lucky to have you’. She appears to view him as some sort of collectible, a trinket to be displayed so that no one can ever question the university’s commitment to inclusion ever again. It is the soft bigotry of low expectations on full display.
The same attitude seeps through almost every sycophantic media opportunity that Arday has been afforded over recent years. Liberal interviewer after liberal interviewer lined up to coo over his confected life story – from raising millions for charity to running 600 miles in six days. But instead of asking basic questions to verify such objectively remarkable claims, they simply didn’t consider it necessary to apply traditional journalistic standards to a neurodivergent person of colour.
We’re not just talking about one or two soft-soap interviews here. Arday was invited to be a guest editor on the Today programme, appeared on Question Time, and on multiple occasions was a panellist on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg. The clips from these appearances have been doing the rounds on social media in the past week. What shines through in each of them is just how transparently imbecilic Arday is. And yet no one had the balls to say the emperor had no clothes.
When being humoured by Krishnan Guru-Murthy on Channel 4’s Ways To Change The World, Arday volunteers that he would ‘take a thread and a needle and I’d interweave love into our society’. Even AI would struggle to generate such meaningless slop, and yet Guru-Murthy nods along earnestly as if exposed to profundity for the first time. During a BBC Radio 4 debate about the future of the monarchy, Arday makes the completely baseless claim that 70 per cent of Brits live below the breadline. Again, this goes entirely unchallenged.
The Good Law Project letter, which was signed by figures including Zack Polanski, John McDonnell and Clive Lewis, argues that ‘universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the colour of their skin.’ I couldn’t agree more. Except that isn’t what Arday’s defenders have been doing. They have been demanding less of him simply because of his race. By promoting Arday as an example of black excellence, they are doing a colossal disservice to the many minority academics who truly deserve such a label.
I’m still in two minds as to how to view Arday himself. Is he a fool or is he a knave? Probably both, in all honesty. But the bigger question is how so many of our most powerful institutions, whether Cambridge University, the BBC, or now the Metropolitan police, were taken in by such an obvious charlatan. Unless of course they weren’t. Perhaps they believed all along that Arday was a fantasist, but were either too scared to say as much, or considered him a useful idiot for the identity politics agenda they are now beholden to.
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