Society

The Jason Arday affair has been a great revealer. On the one hand, it is a glorious romp that has brought much-needed mirth to Britain. On the other, the exposure of Professor Arday isn’t really about the guileless Arday himself, but the establishment that elevated him. It has served up a moment of unavoidable clarity in which the nonsense of progressivism stands exposed like the imperial scrotum. Arday himself can hardly be blamed for this scandal. Like Puff the magic dragon, he is notable only for the effect he had on others It is a perfect storm. We have a fantasist in an environment where, for political and social status reasons, everyone takes his claims at face value, or pretends that they do because to express doubt would be to invite unwanted attention.

Rod Liddle got me into journalism. We always had The Spectator lying around the house when I was young. I soon learned to turn to him first, as most good readers of the magazine do.  My father and I would often read his columns aloud to each other and laugh ourselves into fits. That was Rod’s sublime talent: he made people LOL, long before the internet did.  My first job was at the Catholic Herald, and my then-boss Damian Thompson advised me to improve my writing by copying out the articles of my favorite columnist. I chose Rod, obviously, though of course I could never dream of imitating his style or imaginative wit. I particularly enjoyed his fascination with "the nematode worm which stabs itself to death with its own penis.

One of my friends has never made her own playlist. “I just get on Spotify and use what the algorithm has made for me,” she says. “If I’m in a good mood, I ask for a ‘happy playlist’.”  Then again, I also have friends who are going out of their way to make life less easy. Three of them recently purchased flip phones with no internet connection. Others have bought digital cameras to lug along to every event. CDs are popping up in the center consoles of some of their cars.  Even ‘purchasing’ a movie or TV show on a streaming platform doesn’t guarantee your ownership Is this just an extreme extension of the Y2K aesthetic that has overtaken Instagram feeds?

I’ve never met Professor Jason Arday. I don’t know whether he has genuinely run 600 miles in six days. I also genuinely don’t know the truth about the remarkable similarities between parts of his doctoral thesis at Liverpool John Moores, which helped propel him rocket-like up the academic greasy pole to a chair at Cambridge, and passages in a dissertation written six years earlier by someone at Brunel. From the parts of Arday’s output I have seen, I have found some fairly thin gruel It is undoubtedly possible that this is nothing more than an honest, if rather careless, omission to acknowledge earlier work: academics are, after all, proverbially absent-minded, and writing theses is stressful.