'Great and Unfortunate Things' by Jason Arday

This post starts with a piece I wrote for one of the writing groups of which I am a member and love. I wrote this before I had the chance to read Jason Arday’s book after its UK publication at the end of August. My thoughts on the book follow afterwards.

My rant

Throughout this summer, very unusually, a news story concerning UK academia has rumbled along prominently and ultimately very tragically. As this is very much my little world, I have found that people are continually asking me for my considered opinions about it. So here they are.

In March 2023, amid a considerable fanfare of publicity, Jason Arday arrived at Cambridge as Professor of Sociology of Education. At thirty-seven he was the youngest black professor in the university’s history, and his back story was apparently irresistible. Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay as a small child, he said that he had been unable to speak until he was nearly twelve and unable to read or write until he was eighteen.

Yet he had become a school teacher, completed a PhD and then risen spectacularly up the academic greasy pole. He had been a panelist on ‘Question Time’. He had been a guest editor of the ‘Today Programme’ on Radio 4. He had been awarded several honorary degrees. He had even carried the Olympic torch for part of its journey to London in 2012.

The Faculty of Education at Cambridge was ecstatic about his appointment. Its then head, Professor Hilary Cremin, told him that the Board of Electors had been unanimous: ‘We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.’

And the Cambridge professorship was just the icing on his cake. By his own account, Jason Arday’s had been a quite extraordinary life. He had been chosen as a boy to appear on the legendary documentary series ‘7 Up’. He claimed to have raised millions of pounds for charity and to have completed thirty marathons in thirty-five days – the last nine of them after fracturing his leg, but apparently continuing regardless. There were brain tumours, a mini-stroke and numerous other obstacles overcome along the way. It was all surely almost too inspirational to be true.

Indeed, a publisher had already spotted the possibilities. Simon & Schuster bought Jason Arday’s memoir, ‘Great and Unfortunate Things’, in what he said was a 1.4 million pre-emptive deal (he never specified whether those were pounds or dollars), with publication scheduled for August 2026 on both sides of the Atlantic. This was no longer merely the heartwarming story of an unusually determined academic. Arday was on the verge of becoming a very considerable global public intellectual.

Then, this summer, everything began to unravel.

Questions had been circulating about Jason Arday’s academic work for some time. Within months of the Cambridge appointment, academics working in his field were raising concerns, and by September of last year Jack Grove at ‘Times Higher Education’ was working on a substantial investigation. He assembled a sixty-three-page dossier but, after Professor Arday brought in the formidable libel lawyers Carter-Ruck, his publication decided to drop the story.

The man who finally lit the blue touchpaper could scarcely have been further removed from Cambridge’s impeccably progressive Education Faculty. Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge researcher who describes himself as a ‘race realist’, began investigating Professor Arday in June this year after, he said, being contacted by a Cambridge academic frustrated at the University’s failure to act in response to complaints from colleagues and students. Dr Cofnas had earlier achieved notoriety by arguing in a highly offensive and repulsive manner that, in a genuinely meritocratic society, black people would ‘disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’. In July he began publishing allegations about Arday’s academic record on Substack, and, spotting an opportunity to fill their pages during what was turning into a long, hot summer silly-season, the newspapers started to pile in.

Once journalists started pulling at the threads, rather a lot appeared to come away in their hands. There were allegations of plagiarism involving Arday’s PhD and questions about his published research, including its methodology and the provenance of quotations and research participants. Liverpool John Moores University investigated the plagiarism allegation and did not uphold it, concluding that problems it identified amounted to ‘honest and reasonable error’. The PhD was allowed to stand. That did not, however, end the wider controversy about his scholarship.

Attention then spread from Arday’s academic work to the extraordinary personal history which was about to be marketed internationally in his memoir. Had he really raised millions for charity? Had he really run thirty marathons in thirty-five days, including nine on a fractured leg? Why did Cambridge’s own website describe him as a Visiting Professor at Ohio State and Glasgow when both universities subsequently said that he had held no such position? Why had he claimed elsewhere to have published a book with Palgrave Macmillan which Palgrave said had never appeared?

Most awkwardly of all, questions emerged about the story at the very heart of the Arday legend, namely the severely autistic child who could not speak until he was nearly twelve. Some childhood friends supported his account. Others remembered something very different. One former schoolmate recalled a boy who was always cracking jokes, singing songs and putting on funny voices. A speech therapist who had worked with him as a child reportedly remembered a boy with significant language difficulties who nevertheless spoke competently both to children and adults.

None of this meant that Arday had not overcome formidable difficulties. Clearly he had. Nor does a disagreement over what exactly ‘unable to speak’ meant in the case of a disabled child necessarily establish dishonesty decades later. But by now there were an awful lot of question marks accumulating around his exceptional and conveniently marketable life story.

Hostile coverage went on for weeks. Jason Arday’s face was unwillingly plastered over front pages while inside editorials lambasted him. It did not take long for the saga to become a story about how ‘wokery’ now supposedly dominates the UK university sector and hence about our value to society generally. This has long been a favoured media narrative, and Jason Arday’s case provided a magnificent opportunity for shriller journalistic voices to give it some more welly. Social media then followed the lead and magnified everything out of all proportion.

Cambridge University initially denounced what it suggested was a vile and racially motivated media campaign, but eventually opened investigations of its own. On 5th August Professor Arday resigned, saying that the relentless scrutiny and accusations had taken a profound personal toll. Eight days later he was found dead. He was forty-one and left behind a wife and young family. At the time of writing, his death is being is being treated by police as unexpected but not suspicious and an inquest has been opened.

It is a desperately sad story. But it is also one that has fascinated me all summer, partly because I have spent almost my entire working life in universities and partly because I found myself watching a battle between two increasingly influential tribes, both of whom I find deeply unattractive.

On one side stood a university department so committed to equality, diversity and inclusion that enthusiasm for what Arday represented looks as if it led to there being insufficient scrutiny of his academic record during the recruitment process. On the other stood a febrile ‘anti-woke’ media, ostensibly defending merit and academic integrity, but which scented blood and pursued its quarry with vindictive enthusiasm.

I have become increasingly angered in recent years by a particular kind of extreme progressivism which has established itself remarkably successfully in our culture and in some institutions. I do not object to its objectives. Quite the reverse. I favour greater social equality – of course I do – and the elimination of racial and sexual discrimination and far better opportunities for disadvantaged people generally. I am in favour of promoting human wellbeing. I am also rather keen on leaving behind a habitable planet when I die. They are all thoroughly admirable causes. What is unacceptable is the willingness of some of their more zealous advocates to jettison precious liberal principles in pursuit of their swift achievement.

People should be allowed to say things that others dislike and which offend them. Ideas should be tested by argument and evidence. Individuals should be judged as individuals rather than as representatives of racial or sexual groups. Jobs should go to people on merit, with principles of equal opportunity rigorously applied. Accused people deserve due process. The law should apply equally to everyone. And there should be a strong presumption that adults may live as they choose provided that they are not materially harming others. Free speech, freedom of enquiry, meritocracy, equality before the law, due process, pluralism, the presumption of liberty, parliamentary democracy underpinned by universal suffrage and regular elections – these are the great liberal shibboleths. They are the legacy of centuries of social and political development, and they really, really, really matter.

That is where extreme progressivism is plain wrong and, I think, downright dangerous. If achieving greater racial equality becomes the overriding objective, meritocracy risks becoming an irritating obstacle. We end up jettisoning equal opportunity and loading the dice instead. If certain opinions are believed to ‘perpetuate oppression’, free speech can become subordinated to ‘protection from harm’. If the desired outcome matters more than equal treatment, equality before the law becomes an awkward barrier that should be dismantled.

Environmentalism presents the same temptation. Climate change is clearly real and governments need to act. Sometimes restricting what individuals can do will be entirely justified. But there is a considerable difference between proportionate measures to prevent demonstrable environmental deterioration and treating personal liberty and democratic decision-making as embarrassing bourgeois indulgences which must always give way when somebody invokes the future of the planet.

There is a wonderfully simple test for all this. Would I still approve of the rule if my political opponents were administering it? Would I want Nigel Farage deciding which opinions were too harmful to be expressed at my university? Or Donald Trump deciding which academic research served the public good? What about a socially conservative government insisting that appointments to academic posts should reflect the ‘right values’? If not, perhaps I should be rather careful about claiming those powers for people whose politics on social matters I have more in common with.

That, ultimately, is my objection to extreme progressivism. Its adherents usually want thoroughly admirable things. The danger comes when certainty about the goodness of the destination produces disdain for the vital, hard-won liberal rules and values that sustain our culture.

And this brings me back to Cambridge. It is tempting to conclude that the senior academics in its Faculty of Education were not merely writing books and articles advocating somewhat illiberal, progressive ideals but putting them into practice when making appointments. We do not yet know that this is what happened, and Cambridge has commissioned an investigation into Professor Arday’s appointment. But there is a real case to answer. He was, from an institutional EDI perspective, an almost impossibly attractive appointment. He was black, disabled, came from a disadvantaged background and possessed an inspirational life story to boot. Cambridge could appoint him to one of its prestigious chairs, proclaim him its youngest ever black professor and demonstrate to the world just how thoroughly committed it was to equality, diversity and inclusion.

The question Cambridge now has to confront is whether enthusiasm for this extraordinary personal story contributed to insufficiently rigorous scrutiny of the much more mundane question that should determine a highly prestigious professorial appointment, namely was the academic record itself strong enough to justify it?

As one side in this sorry affair was apparently busy virtue-signaling, the other was happily dog-whistling and using Professor Arday as a weapon in its campaign against ‘woke’ academia. The journalists who led the hunt insist, sometimes with a hefty slug of synthetic indignation, that they were doing nothing more than pursuing ‘the truth’. Well, only up to a point, Lord Copper. Perhaps the truth and nothing but the truth, but absolutely not the whole truth. Newspapers select which truths they want to investigate, which to put on the front page, which to pursue for days on end and which to leave buried in paragraph seventeen on page twenty-three. Those choices matter and they have all too human consequences.

British universities have started to become extraordinarily convenient quarry. There seems to be a sizeable section of our press which positively loathes us. Why, I have never entirely understood. Perhaps we academics irritate them because we constitute an alternative source of information, ideas and authority. We spend our lives studying things and explaining them and, inconveniently for journalists, people sometimes listen to us.

Whatever the explanation, an entire mythology has been painstakingly constructed over several years in which universities are useless, hopelessly ‘woke’ institutions stuffed with overpaid lefties teaching worthless degrees and filling the gullible young brains of eighteen-year-olds with rubbish.

The technique has been remarkably effective. Find an absurd example in one of Britain’s hundred-plus universities, add another from somewhere else six months later, recycle both repeatedly, and eventually you have created the impression that the entire sector has gone bonkers.

I find nothing more infuriating than reading work by a journalist who has enjoyed a fine higher education explaining to other people why their children cannot have one too. They should all train as plumbers apparently. Still, outrage generates clicks and newspapers need those rather desperately nowadays as their sales plummet.

Jason Arday was almost custom-built for this narrative. Here was a black, left-leaning Cambridge professor, celebrated by his university as a triumph of diversity, around whose academic record some pretty serious questions had arisen. Of course those questions were matters of legitimate public interest. Of course journalists were entitled to investigate them. But was every new discrepancy really national news? Did every questionable claim require another front-page headline, another photograph, another angry column and another day’s public humiliation?

A flavour of the journalistic onslaught, and of the way the case was used to whip up scorn towards universities, can be gleaned from some of the headlines. ‘The Telegraph’ published a piece by Allison Pearson under the headline ‘The Cambridge fantasist is proof that stupid intellectuals are poisoning Britain’. Meanwhile Tomiwa Owolade informed his readers that ‘Jason Arday is merely a symptom of the Left’s corruption of excellence’. Rather sweeping claims. Even after his resignation the sport continued. Daniel Sokol’s opinion piece was headed ‘A PhD is no longer a sign of brilliance – take it from Dr Arday’. Over at ‘The Times’, Trevor Phillips dismissed Jason Arday as a ‘mediocre’ talent, claiming that the ‘gushing embrace’ he had received at Cambridge ‘owed everything to his colour and nothing to his capability’.

And in the early hours of the day Jason Arday died, the ‘Daily Mail’ published a piece by psychiatrist Max Pemberton asking ‘Why would Professor Plagiarism make such outlandish claims?’, which proceeded to speculate about a psychiatric explanation for his behaviour despite its author acknowledging that he had never met him.

Whatever one thinks about the questions concerning Arday’s academic conduct, by this point we had surely travelled a very long way from sober investigative journalism.

I simply do not believe that a white medieval historian from a similar background, but with conservative opinions, whose CV contained comparable discrepancies and whose PhD had attracted comparable questions would have generated anything approaching the same feeding frenzy. There might have been a story of some kind – but probably not. At most, it would have appeared somewhere around page 14 of a single broadsheet newspaper, entertained the tiny number of people who enjoy reading about university governance, and disappeared two days later. Jason Arday was different because he could be made to stand for something much bigger – EDI, ‘wokery’, positive discrimination, ‘political correctness gone mad’ and everything else a particular kind of columnist had already decided was wrong with British universities.

And once the press decides that somebody is Exhibit A, reporters’ behaviour can become remarkably like that of a pack of hyenas. One newspaper finds something, another finds something else, columnists happily join in and the hunt appears to become almost pleasurable in itself. Social media amplifies it and the spotlight gets brighter and brighter until virtually every mistake the unfortunate individual has ever made across decades gets turned into a stark headline. Context disappears. Proportion disappears. Nuance has no chance.

The result was a grotesquely one-dimensional portrait. Jason Arday had certainly done things deserving serious scrutiny and criticism. But he had also been a loving father and husband, a teacher, an academic and a colleague. He had inspired people, overcome genuine disability and been highly regarded by many of his students. None of that absolves him of anything. It simply reminds us that human beings are complicated. Unfortunately, ‘Flawed academic who nevertheless did some great things’ is a rotten headline.

There was something particularly absurd about the po-faced revelation that Cambridge had apparently promoted somebody beyond his abilities. Really? Please! In my experience academia has been promoting people beyond their abilities since well before the invention of the overhead projector. The sector is liberally populated with senior managers, professors and assorted grand panjandrums whose ascent through the hierarchy remains one of the great unexplained mysteries of modern science. In fact, over-promotion is not at all unusual. Many of them are paid quite magnificently for demonstrating the Peter Principle on a daily basis. Yet their inadequacies do not normally merit a month of hysterical national media coverage.

What made Jason Arday different was that his alleged failings were useful. They fitted a pre-existing story that journalists wanted to tell. And that is where, this summer, legitimate journalism seemed to turn into something much uglier. A journalist has every right to expose wrongdoing. But journalism also involves choices about prominence, repetition, tone and proportion. Jason Arday was not a government minister, a chief executive or a man exercising enormous power over other people’s lives. He was an evidently vulnerable academic around whose work and public biography serious questions had arisen. He had clearly made misjudgments. So have I. On many occasions. All the time. So have we all. Yet he was subjected to a level of scrutiny and public humiliation wildly disproportionate to his importance.

The newspapers got their story. The columnists got their clicks. Editors got to feel terribly pleased about having exposed the latest manifestation of ‘woke’ Britain. And a human being at the centre of it all was subjected to an extraordinary and sustained public ordeal.

And that is why this desperately sad affair matters. Jason Arday found himself caught between two competing orthodoxies of virtue. On one side were progressives so convinced of the righteousness of diversity and inclusion that questions now have to be asked about whether merit and academic standards received sufficient attention. On the other were anti-woke crusaders so convinced that they were defending truth and merit that fairness, proportion and ordinary human decency sometimes appeared equally dispensable.

Both sides believed themselves to be fighting their good fight. Both made Jason Arday useful to their own purposes. The liberal-left academics needed him to be a hero, while his most vehement journalistic critics needed him to be a villain. He was neither. He was a complicated, flawed and vulnerable human being with a mixed record who deserved better.

My thoughts on the book

I enjoyed reading ‘Great and Unfortunate Things’, some of which I listened to via Audible while commuting into work. Jason Arday recorded the audiobook before the furore of this summer, and it is hard to listen to it knowing what was shortly to transpire. His manner is gentle and calm, his voice attractive and clear. He reads the book extremely well. But listening also left me wondering to what extent he was actually reading his own prose?

The book is formally credited to ‘Jason Arday with Eve Claxton’, and that ‘with’ is intriguing. Eve Claxton is an experienced professional writer who states on her website that she has worked as a co-writer, ghostwriter or ‘book doctor’ on more than two dozen non-fiction books, including a number of memoirs. There is nothing remotely concealed about her involvement here.

What is not clear, however, is precisely how this collaboration worked. Did Jason Arday write drafts which Claxton helped to shape? Did the two of them compose the book together? Or did Eve Claxton interview Arday – and potentially others – before turning what she heard into this very well-honed first-person narrative? I can find no published account which settles the question. It is therefore perfectly possible that these are Arday’s memories but substantially Claxton’s words.

There would be nothing unusual about that in a celebrity memoir. It is, however, rather more intriguing in the autobiography of a professor with an extensive publication record of his own. Why did he not simply write the book himself? In the light of the questions subsequently raised about aspects of his academic writing, it is difficult not to wonder about his ability to compose such polished prose. That question may be unfair, and the involvement of a professional co-writer certainly proves nothing in itself. But without knowing more about how Arday and Claxton worked together, it is a question the book inevitably left me asking.

It is also impossible to read the memoir without continually reflecting on its accuracy. All memoirs are personal reconstructions drawing upon fallible memories. They select, simplify and impose patterns on the untidiness of a life. But in this case a number of claims about Jason Arday’s career and achievements were subsequently seriously challenged, and I could not help becoming a little suspicious at points, particularly when he describes succeeding against apparently insurmountable odds.

For example, there is a passage towards the end in which he describes being forced by Liverpool John Moores University to prepare for and sit his PhD viva – on pain of losing his job – just three weeks after undergoing brain surgery. Having worked in British universities for more than thirty years, I found myself wondering whether the circumstances can really have been quite as stark as they are presented here. Universities have elaborate procedures surrounding student welfare, disability and extenuating circumstances. As presented here solely from Jason Arday’s perspective, this story simply did not ring true to me.

Nor, in all honesty, did all of the many instances he describes of educational and psychology professionals writing him off and dismissing his potential, not just when he was a young child with significant communication difficulties but throughout his childhood and teenage years. They are portrayed here as callous, sometimes potentially racist and, in one case, violent men and women.

In the piece I wrote about the affair above I complained that journalists covering the Arday story had an aversion to nuance in the way that they reported his record. I began to wonder whether Jason Arday – or perhaps Arday and Claxton together – had fallen into something of the same trap. The narrative presented to us is one in which a small group of good people, notably his mother, girlfriend and one particular teacher, believed in him when almost nobody else did. Perhaps that really was how he experienced his childhood. But as a description of the behaviour and motivations of all the people and institutions around him, I found it difficult to accept without qualification. Lives are usually messier than stories, and memoirs can readily turn the former into the latter.

My creeping scepticism meant that my feelings towards Jason Arday became steadily less sympathetic as I read. When he was writing about his early childhood I was very much on his side. His parents are portrayed as hugely admirable figures – a hardworking, very religious couple who had migrated to Britain and were bringing up three boys, two of whom had disabilities, in a south London council house. Giff, his mother, is the great heroine of the book, simply refusing not to push hard at every closed or semi-closed door on her son’s behalf.

I also found it impossible to read these passages without thinking about current British political debates. This was an immigrant family doing precisely what politicians of almost every stripe have traditionally claimed to want. They worked long-hours, brought up three pretty impressive boys, supported one another and tried relentlessly to improve their circumstances through education.

Yet Reform UK has proposed restricting access to council housing for non-British citizens and evicting tenants who are not British citizens, while the Conservatives – shamefully in my opinion - have also moved towards restricting eligibility according to nationality and contribution. They too propose eviting people who are not Europeans from social housing. Reading about the Arday family brought home to me the kind of decent human beings to whom rules of this kind would apply. Giff and her husband are precisely the sort of people whose contribution to this country we ought to celebrate rather than retrospectively treat as less deserving because they happened to have been born somewhere else.

As I read on, however, I became more and more disappointed with Jason Arday as a character. For me there were two major problems, and I am happy to accept that both reflect my own interests and prejudices.

The first was what I found to be an extraordinary absence of intellectual life from the memoir. Arday says almost nothing about the research he published and which was supposedly so exceptional as to fuel his extraordinarily rapid rise through the sociological academic ranks. He acknowledges that he was never a conventionally trained sociologist and says that his research drew considerably on personal experience, but there is remarkably little about the fieldwork he conducted, the arguments he developed or the contribution he believed he had made to our knowledge and understanding.

More striking still, there is very little account of his intellectual development. Which sociologists changed the way he thought? Which books transformed his understanding of education, race or inequality? What research finding particularly excited him? Which ideas did he once believe but later abandon?

These are things I would normally expect to encounter in the memoir of a senior academic, particularly one who had risen to a Cambridge professorship.

Instead, popular culture does all of the heavy lifting. He quotes extensively from song lyrics and the ‘Rocky’ films, while serious literature and sustained engagement with scholarly ideas are very scarce. There is nothing wrong with learning from popular culture on occasion, but the intellectual life presented in these pages seems remarkably thin for someone who had risen to one of Cambridge’s most prestigious professorships. It doesn’t smell right somehow.

The second problem is the overwhelming tone of self-congratulation that gradually emerges from the book. This is particularly curious because Jason Arday’s speaking voice is so gentle and apparently unassuming. The content, however, is almost entirely without modesty. He is generous about those who helped him on his way, but the accumulating story is one extraordinary achievement after another. The endless boasting is accompanied by relatively little serious reflection on his own limitations, errors or failures.

I began to feel that Jason Arday had swallowed his own mythology hook, line and sinker. The memoir gives the impression that he genuinely came to see himself not merely as exceptionally determined and successful, but as an unusually virtuous person too. I am sure many high achievers possess a similarly robust view of their own merits – perhaps some degree of it is necessary to achieve extraordinary things – but most have the nous at least to introduce a little self-deprecation when writing about themselves. Again, what I missed was nuance.

It is also difficult not to wonder how this book would have been received had Jason Arday lived and seen his book published. The controversy would surely have continued. Simon & Schuster, with an experienced co-writer on board and its editorial and legal processes behind the book, was evidently prepared to publish the account. Further attempts to portray every episode in it simply as invention might therefore have proved difficult to sustain. My suspicion, however, is that the danger to Jason Arday’s reputation would have shifted in a different direction - from accusations of fabrication towards ridicule.

The reason is the extraordinary self-confidence of the figure who emerges from these pages. There is something almost comic at times about the gulf between the grandeur of Arday’s estimation of his own achievements and the doubts that had begun to surround parts of his academic record. Many great comic characters are powered by misplaced overconfidence. They possess an unshakeable conviction about their own talents which the reader or viewer sees through. I found an uncomfortable echo of that here. Had Jason Arday not died, I suspect that this aspect of the memoir – the heroic self-presentation, the succession of extraordinary achievements, the near-total absence of self-doubt or intellectual modesty – would have attracted increasing mockery. This memoir is, in truth, ripe for parody of the Craig Brown variety.

That is, of course, speculation, and his death makes it particularly important not to pretend that an alternative future can be known. But it was where my thoughts were heading as I finished the book.

Jason Arday emerges from his own memoir as someone who was in many ways admirable. He was kind, hardworking, devoted to his family, extraordinarily determined and undoubtedly possessed of an enormous will to prove himself. Yet the intellectual life presented in these pages seems remarkably shallow for a Cambridge professor, while his confidence in his own exceptionalism seems almost boundless. That combination might have proved increasingly difficult for a hostile public to resist mocking and laughing at.

What we are left with instead is something much sadder and more complicated, namely a memoir narrated in Jason Arday’s own gentle voice, telling the story he wanted the world to hear, published at almost exactly the moment when that story was being subjected to its most hostile scrutiny.

There is a horribly poignant passage towards the end of the book. Filling in his application for Cambridge, Jason Arday wonders whether everything might be happening too quickly. ‘What if I have completely overestimated my capabilities?’ he asks himself. What if his extraordinary story should turn out to be an Icarus-like cautionary tale about ‘flying too close to the sun?’

He concludes, of course, that he deserves everything and dismisses his own doubts as those which many people who are disabled and come from ethnic minority backgrounds have thanks to the way they are treated by society.

The truth was that Professor Arday did indeed fly far too close to the sun, and his wings melted away in the most tragic way imaginable.

And there is one further passage in the book which is particularly difficult to read in the light of what subsequently happened. Jason Arday describes in harrowing detail how, following the breakdown of his marriage, he came very close to taking his own life.

There is perhaps no reason to suppose that the journalists who later investigated him knew about this episode – although it was included in the book proposal that some used when writing their stories about him in early August. But by the end of July 2026 there could no longer be any doubt that serious concerns existed about his vulnerability. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who knew Jason Arday personally and is one of Britain’s leading authorities on autism, publicly described the treatment of him as the ‘relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man’ and explicitly raised the danger of suicide.

That did not remove the legitimate public interest in investigating serious questions about Arday’s academic record and the claims he had made about his life. It should, however, have caused editors to reflect very carefully on the manner, intensity and cumulative effect of their coverage. Reading Jason Arday’s account of how close he had already once come to ending his life makes that warning, and what followed it, especially troubling.

I desperately hope that some good will now come out of this awful episode. I dream that universities will now firmly recommit in all circumstances to appointment and promotion solely on grounds of merit, and that that our newspaper industry might examine its own conscience, moderate its accustomed approaches and discover a greater sense of proportion, particularly when attacking vulnerable people.

Sadly though, on both counts, I am not holding my breath.