Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday

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 the nation. 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.

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. In such fertile ground the fantasist’s claims 
(which he continues to deny fabricating) inevitably become increasingly 
outlandish – epic marathon runs, prophetic blessings, an appearance in a 
television programme that began 20 years before he was born – because he 
is increasingly secure that they will never be questioned. This is what 
inevitably occurs when a fantasist encounters people who want, for 
whatever reason, to believe his fantasies.

It can be quite uncanny to see a fantasist at work. I once heard of a TV 
project that met for its first big production meeting. It was only then, 
after weeks of prep across different departments, that it gradually 
occurred to everybody that the show hadn’t actually been commissioned. 
The writer had just told everybody that it had. And they’d wanted to 
believe.

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. Who would 
dare to speak up against a wunderkind that made a lot of powerful people 
feel better about themselves? Like love, mediocrity will always find a 
way. DEI is its great enabler, but this can never be acknowledged.

Even now we can see the reluctance of Arday’s cheerleaders to throw in 
the towel. LBC’s James O’Brien, for example, who at the height of 
Arday’s fame nodded along to his rambling tosh, is currently fighting a 
desperate rearguard action, telling his Bluesky followers that the 
Telegraph and the Times have crossed the line into ‘studied [and] 
deliberate ignominy’ with their Arday stories. I love how O’Brien goes 
all Victorian in his vocabulary on these occasions. He must think it 
makes him look very serious. He goes on, ‘If there is any case to answer 
here, it is about Liverpool John Moore’s supervisory failure of an 
obviously unique PhD student. Something, I imagine, their own exhaustive 
investigation concluded… [it] would be comical if the motivation of 
Jason’s enemies were not so hideously obvious.’

Like all of Arday’s fans, O’Brien’s only remaining option is to throw 
murky aspersions of racism on the people who have revealed him to be 
such a colossal, credulous prat.

And of course, O’Brien has form on this as long as your arm, with his 
enthusiastic vaunting of the claims of the fantasist and later convicted 
paedophile Carl Beech. In both cases, O’Brien wanted very badly to 
believe a very obvious fantasy.

Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the 
whole shebang of  progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them 
seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded 
in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie 
Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man 
on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the 
progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.

People who want to believe are easy marks for the not-very-good and 
delusional. The Labour party is currently in the grip of just such a 
mania. Andy Burnham is only another kind of fantasist. According to him, 
after all, the big problems facing Britain in 2026 are Mrs Thatcher, 
Sainsbury’s and not enough mayors. Is that really much less bizarre than 
Arday’s claims? It feels a bit like he’s pulled three things out of a 
hat. Another dip would have brought up unicycles, Toyah and not enough 
people called Steve. And on the right, enough people want to believe in 
Rupert Lowe as the next prime minister, despite his actual status as 
nothing much more than an electoral irritant to Reform.

As Arday shows, we need safeguards against that common human failing: 
ignoring the truth in favour of what we’d prefer to be real.


Gareth Roberts