The Jason Arday Saga Is a Story of Great British Gullibility

April may be the cruellest month, but August is the daftest. For around a fortnight now, we’ve all had to participate in the story of Jason Arday, a former professor in Cambridge University’s education department (he quit last week). Has anyone ever heard of that faculty before? Well, you have now.

I’ll give you the long story short. Arday, appointed in 2023 and Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor, had, it turns out, a well-publicised biography with significant inconsistencies. His academic work is also in dispute, with allegations of plagiarism in his PhD thesis and potentially other forms of academic misconduct in some of his published work making headlines.

For his part, in his resignation letter, Arday described his “profound sadness” at the decision to step down. He added that the intense public scrutiny had “taken a profound toll on me and on those I love”. However, he vowed to “return stronger, wiser and with the same determination” and said his resignation should not “be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me”.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing around these claims, endless calls for investigations, and the general sense that, yes, it’s the end times. But lads, don’t we live in Britain? Isn’t the (alleged) grift a national industry?

You say con. I say: that’s Britness, baby.

I don’t want to defend Jason Arday. To be honest, I find the story mostly hilarious.  I hadn’t heard of him before the last few weeks. But could people really have believed that he was mute til 11, illiterate til 18, but also, a runner of multiple marathons and a former sufferer of locked-in syndrome to boot? God bless his old primary schoolmate, who, claiming online to remember a young Arday, labelled him a ‘chatty patty’. And they say this country needs more weapons.

Cambridge University dons were beguiled by Arday – you only have to watch the BBC broadcast around his appointment to see and hear it from his head of department. Never mind that Britain has been beguiled by Cambridge – and Oxford – for centuries. Many, it seems, still believe the fairytale that these two institutions are the nation’s Harry Potter sorting hat, infallibly sifting the best from the rest. We eat it up. That’s partly why this mild puncturing of national mythology – Arday was, after all, just one among over 6,000 Cambridge academic staff – has generated such overheated reactions.

Yes, Cambridge fell for it. And from that fact we’re asked to draw sweeping diagnostic conclusions about everything that’s wrong with the country. The right has its answer – the “victimisation” of white people to the benefit of people of other ethnicities has gone too far, not just in academia but everywhere. This shouldn’t even need a reply, when last year there were just 75 black academics across all levels in a university that draws talent from across the world. That’s just 1.25% of its teaching and research staff.

Their lives are very likely now going to be made hell, as scores of MacBook Miss Marples, suddenly gifted with the ability to judge advanced research in fields from nanotechnology to ancient Greek, start scouring their work. And the rest of us will have to endure even more weepy existential questions from people who suddenly find that this one university really, really matters to them.

If you care about British universities, maybe worry about the imminent contraction of a sector that employs around 700,000 people. I’m not seeing a lot of headlines about that.

Still, how could Cambridge – Cambridge! – be fooled? The answer isn’t complicated. It exists in Britain, a nation of patsies that repeatedly falls for cons.

We’re constantly beguiled. We were deceived by the Lib Dems in the coalition government, then by austerity, then by Brexit. We were fooled by ops against Jeremy Corbyn, oven-ready deals from Boris Johnson and PPE contracts during Covid (Michelle Mone is still in the House of Lords, by the way). Keir Starmer played an absolute blinder in the deception-leagues. And Reform UK, distorted by now seemingly endless financial scandals, still somehow survives.

I’d love to say that, in our tradition of national self-owns, Jason Arday represents black excellence. But no. It’s a B-minus at best. The only innovation is that, finally, the establishment got duped. You know what? Make it a B.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult not to ask: are we just a nation of numpties? Is it our fate to fall constant prey to tricksters and scammers? Are we – and I shudder – the Facebook nation, doomed perpetually to be fooled by boomerslop, only to get annoyed when someone points it out? “I paid 500 quid for that trampoline,” you may soon find yourself screaming, “the bunnies WILL bounce”.

Our own eyes tell us we’re in trouble. Our bank balances get thinner, our costs get higher and an invisible 1% gets ever richer. We walk around outside this summer and parched grass crumbles to dust beneath our feet. We know water is growing scarcer, yet we’ll ask an ever-thirsty Chat GPT how to spell “contradiction”. Rome is burning, yet we can’t help but chirp over Jason Arday, the least consequential story to occupy our collective consciousness in literally years. Brits are supposed to hate a fuss, yet here we are, fussing.

September can’t come soon enough.