Re: Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday

On 04/08/2026 20:00, Julian wrote:
> 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

Scotland Yard investigated a journalist trying to expose a plagiarism 
row and told him to stop asking a Cambridge professor questions.

Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE), was accused of 
harassment after he emailed a series of questions to Prof Jason Arday 
about his academic record. Mr Grove said officers told him to stop 
contacting the professor because his “mental health” had been affected 
by the questions.

Prof Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, which suggested in a 
letter to THE that its “apparent attack” on him “may be... racially 
motivated”.

The Metropolitan Police spent four months looking into the claim of 
harassment before deciding in February to close the case.

The police did not interview Mr Grove, who only found out about the 
investigation when the Met contacted him to inform him that they would 
not be taking action.

The Met also reportedly passed on a complaint to another force about an 
academic who was also looking into the academic record of Prof Arday, 
but the other force refused to investigate.

The Met is among forces that have been accused in recent months of 
wasting time on pointless investigations while insisting that they do 
not have the manpower to routinely attend burglaries and other crimes.

Mr Grove told The Telegraph that he had been “stunned” to receive a 
phone call from the police to be told he had been investigated simply 
for doing his job.

He said: “I was told a complaint had been made against me and 
investigated, but the force was not taking it forward. The officer told 
me that I shouldn’t contact Professor Arday again because his mental 
health had been affected by my actions.

“I asked him what I had done, and he said there had been online posts 
about Professor Arday. I said I’d never posted anything about him and 
asked him if he realised he was speaking to a journalist who was 
investigating a story. He didn’t really respond but repeated his request 
for me not to contact Professor Arday again, citing his mental health.

“I was just doing my job. Journalists should be free to ask questions of 
anyone, even star professors. It’s very rare that academics refuse to 
speak to the press – that caused me to look into this matter further and 
I was astonished by what I found.”

Mr Grove had started looking into Prof Arday’s background after being 
tipped off by academics who had found apparent evidence of plagiarism in 
his work.

He emailed Prof Arday and Cambridge University, as well as Liverpool 
John Moores University – which had awarded him his PhD – to ask 
questions about the apparent overlap with another student’s PhD. He also 
asked questions about Prof Arday’s claims of raising £5.5m for charity 
through seemingly improbable feats of ultra-distance running.

That prompted the letter from Carter-Ruck in September last year, and in 
November last year a formal complaint of harassment was made to the 
police. Mr Grove has never been told who made the complaint.

The university denied it was them.

Separately, The Guardian reported that the Met passed on a complaint of 
harassment to Devon and Cornwall Police that had been made about a 
professor at Plymouth Marjon University.

Prof David Harris had contacted Cambridge with his own concerns about 
Prof Arday’s work, which triggered the complaint to the Met. Devon and 
Cornwall Police refused to investigate, The Guardian reported.

A spokesman for the Met said: “On 18 November 2025, the Met received an 
allegation of harassment. The case was closed in February this year.”

A spokesman for Cambridge University said: “The university did not make 
any complaint to the police against Jack Grove in 2025. Neither was it 
aware of any such complaint being made.”

Prof Arday was contacted for comment.

Prof Arday has, in recent days, put his apparent plagiarism down to 
autism, saying he absorbs information through mimicry.

He has also admitted that a claim about running 600 miles in six days 
for charity was wrong (saying it took 12 days) and has said that he did 
not single-handedly raise £5.5m for charity but was part of a syndicate 
of around 100 people, none of whom he can name because he signed a 
non-disclosure agreement.

It also emerged on Tuesday that Prof Arday falsely claimed to have been 
a visiting professor at Ohio State University.

On the Cambridge Faculty of Education page, he claims to be a visiting 
professor at the US university in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

However, a university spokesman said they had “no record of an employee 
by that name” and that “visiting professors appear in our employment 
records”.

Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion also closed last year.

It comes a day after Glasgow University denied Prof Arday’s claims that 
he was a visiting professor in the university’s School of Education.

Non-crimes

Police forces around the country have been accused of wasting resources 
on investigating non-crimes.

Avon and Somerset Police arrested an evangelical pastor for “inciting 
religious hatred” after he gave a sermon criticising Islam and 
transgender ideology, before deciding to take no action.

Police in Hertfordshire arrested the parents of a nine-year-old girl in 
2025 after they made “disparaging” comments about her primary school in 
a WhatsApp group. The investigation was dropped five weeks later.

In 2020, Scotland Yard investigated Darren Grimes, the conservative 
commentator, on suspicion of inciting racial hatred after he released an 
interview with Dr David Starkey, the historian, about the slave trade. 
The force later accepted no offence had taken place.


Gordon Rayner