Halfway through watching the hit Netflix series The Tinder Swindler, I realised I was cheering on the swindler Simon Leviev, who won me over with his ingenuity.
I had the same reaction to Jason Arday. ‘Go on my son!’ I heard myself exclaiming as I waded through the outraged coverage of the former Cambridge professor’s extraordinary exploits.
Whether or not he even knows it, Jason Arday played the rotten, elitist, box-ticking, minority and sick note obsessed education regime brilliantly
When it got to the bit about him running nine marathons with a broken leg it occurred to me that anyone who did not appreciate this saga for its daring and scope was just plain anti-enterprise.
Anyone who is offended by the improbable adventures of the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history is missing the point. Jason Arday played a very bad system that deserved to be played. That is why the row over his credentials reminds me of the Tindler Swindler furore, when Israeli businessman Shimon Hayut, who changed his name to Simon Leviev, provoked worldwide feminist outrage after playing women, and dating apps, at their own game.
Leviev would entice a woman by posting pictures of himself on a private jet, then, a few dates in, he would ask her for money in some plausible emergency and use that money to hire the next private jet to entice the next woman, and so on. What was impressive was that he kept reinvesting the money given to him by women who thought they’d bagged a rich man to grow his scheme exponentially. He had vision.
The same could be said of Frank Abagnale Jr who forged cheques so brilliantly he ended up being employed by the FBI, according to the movie Catch Me If You Can. I wonder what the movie of Arday’s life will be called: Spellcheck Me If You Dare?
Of course, in an ideal world, Arday should not have embellished his credentials, as is claimed, or borrowed from other people’s work, allegedly, or over-emphasised how much he couldn’t speak for years or how broken one of legs was while running a chain of marathons during which he collapsed with epilepsy.
But whatever the truth – and he might yet be fully vindicated – a part of me thinks he’s a genius. And when I say a part of me, I mean the part who remembers sitting in a school hall in Coventry trembling over the Oxbridge entrance paper, knowing the odds of me getting into Oxford or Cambridge were so low it was barely worth me turning up. Only one pupil from my inner-city former boys’ grammar got into Oxford that year and she had a doctor’s note about an elaborate condition. The truth is the system has been this way for much longer than the current row claims.
Whether or not he even knows it, Jason Arday played the rotten, elitist, box-ticking, minority and sick note obsessed education regime brilliantly. He outwitted the cleverest people in Britain – well, people who like to think they’re clever. He outsmarted those who would have us believe they’re the enlightened and have the right to rule. People who opine that vaccination should be mandatory. That was an actual Cambridge Union debate a few years ago, never let us forget. Bright young things lined up to argue for an end to bodily autonomy. These people are numbskulls.
So never mind Arday’s grammar, consider the grand sweep of his achievement. He has shown us that the emperor has no clothes. One way or another, he has had Cambridge over, and I care not a jot for Cambridge as a victim, nor do I care for the buyer’s regret of the liberal elite who suddenly claim to be shocked that a person who can’t always spell or get grammar right could rise to the top of academia by playing on certain narratives.
Who else was harmed by Arday allegedly over-emphasising the extent of his impairments, or producing a PhD with passages purportedly similar to a thesis published earlier? Those who might claim they would have got places had Arday not been in their way? Please. The next people in the queue were likely all playing the race or non-binary cards, and parroting leftist tropes in interviews with keffiyeh-wearing professors of sociology of education.
Academia is rigged. The word ‘education’ comes from the Latin ‘educare’, which means to train. It is brainwashing.
If you believe Oxbridge to be a confidence trick of sorts, and I do, then you’re delighted to see Arday exploit it to make a buck or two, just like when he bunked off school and played snooker for money.
Arday, like a consummate showman, gave his audience what they wanted. If Leviev harnessed the female desire for rich men, Arday harnessed the desperate urge of our reverse meritocracy to reward underdogs, sob stories and mind-numbingly dull ideas.
I don’t think what he did was at all easy to pull off. Consider the thesis in question: ‘An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring among Student Teachers’ to Inform Reflective Practice within the Context of Action Research’. I read half of the first sentence and my brain went numb.
Would you want to write 401 pages of that, or even cobble it together with bits from elsewhere? No. Me neither. So best we don’t complain.
What interests me is who Arday really is. ‘I need time to heal. I need time to simply be myself again,’ he said in his resignation statement. There was something of the lost boy about Abagnale and Leviev. Both were running from reality, and I wonder if that is Arday’s story too.
A hard early life can lead to a form of self-reliance that allows a person to act ruthlessly in their own interests, but that doesn’t diminish their skill. If anything, they’re more resourceful.
Leviev, the son of a rabbi who grew up in Brooklyn, pretended to be a member of a billionaire diamond-trading family. Abagnale, born in the Bronx, impersonated a Pan-Am pilot, a Georgia physician and a Louisiana assistant attorney general.
Perhaps they didn’t need the money so much as the buzz of pretending to be someone else. They decided to escape by any means the mundanity of their lives. The trouble they provoked encapsulated a wider social issue, the system being rigged. Unless they broke the rules they wouldn’t have succeeded.
Arday, who grew up in Clapham, seized hold of every opportunity, using what he had to use. What drove him to a place where he had to write mind-freezingly dull essays? This is why he is fascinating.
Whether or not he over-projected to the degree alleged, his public image has collapsed in a media pile-on that must be horrendous to endure, with plenty of racism and an obscene amount of gloating. I think what’s really narked the chattering classes about Arday is he worked their system to his benefit.
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