The most unfortunate thing

Jason Arday's death is terrible. So is using it to attack journalism

By Jason Arday’s own account, he experienced a lot of bad luck in his life. He had tumours (in his brain, according to his memoir Great and Unfortunate Things, which I reviewed for The Times; one in his testicle, according to the proposal for that book). He was randomly beaten up by four youths, leaving him with epilepsy (I could find no contemporary reports to corroborate this). He was hit by a car, and comatose for months (another story that was in the proposal but not the final text).

Unpicking the truth, or otherwise, of these claims has become a national sport over the last four weeks. Arday’s biggest piece of bad luck, though, is unquestionable. It was a gigantic misfortune for the questions about his life and career to come to prominence in the summer, when parliament is closed and the news agenda is a vacuum. The Substack post by Nathan Cofnas that initiated Arday’s fall was published on 21 July — that’s one day after Andy Burnham assumed the Labour leadership and became prime minister, and two days after the World Cup final. As a country, we were desperate for something to talk about.

And Arday was a perfect silly season story. It was — and I am sorry to say this now that Arday is dead, but it is true — very funny. There was a childish brazenness to his exaggerations and inventions. Running 600 miles in six days, and 30 marathons in 35 days (some with a broken leg): obviously ridiculous. When The Guardian’s Lanre Bakare investigated some of Arday’s more baroque claims of harassment and found they didn’t stand up, Arday’s response was hilarious: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.” This was a misfortune for Arday too. If he had been less amusing, he’d have attracted less attention.

But it was also (another misfortune) a serious story. It fell plum into the narrative of DEI-run-amok: Arday was significantly underqualified for his job at Cambridge, which was thrilled to have appointed the youngest black professor in its history. The story also raised questions more broadly about academic standards in the humanities, regarding both Arday’s education (Liverpool John Moores, which awarded his doctorate, confirmed that he had received just one in-person supervision while writing his PhD, which was later found to have substantial signs of plagiarism) and the education he provided to his own students.

There was the issue of police overreach. When Jack Grove of the Times Higher Education Supplement submitted a routine journalistic query to Arday, Arday reported him to the police — and the police pursued the journalist, pressuring him to abandon the story. There was legal chill. Arday retained the specialist defamation firm Carter Ruck and threatened reporters with the possibility of libel action. And yes, there was racism: Cofnas is a “race realist” who considers black people intellectually inferior. But it would not have fallen to Cofnas to break the story of a “DEI cover-up” if there hadn’t been a cover-up.

Arday’s self-mythologising was not harmless. He hurt the academics whose work he plagiarised. He hurt the discipline he belonged to. He hurt the early career lecturers who were competing with him for jobs, but couldn’t match his fantastical legend. He hurt the families of non-verbal children who believed the story of his unprecedented late acquisition of language, and either blamed themselves for lacking the patience and love of Arday’s mother, or blamed their children for their failure to blossom. (For whatever reason, that’s the part that made me angriest.)

Arday’s fall did receive a vast amount of coverage, and some of that was racially inflected. In a different month, there would have been less of it. But I’m not sure I can say the coverage was overall disproportionate. The Salt Path scandal, for example, was very extensively reported, and that does not have nearly the same serious implications as the Arday story (medical misrepresentation and general non-fiction ethics aside). Should I, for example, have not reviewed his book? Should I have silenced my doubts about his medical history? I would have been failing to do the basics of my job in either case.

Academic plagiarists don’t usually make headlines, but Arday was not any old academic. He was a star, who had done the media rounds on his appointment to Cambridge. He was publishing a high-profile memoir with celebrity blurbs: Kathy Burke called it “a remarkable book by a unique and extraordinary man”. He had chosen the spotlight. Genuine entertainment, genuine importance, genuine public interest: put those things together, and in the absence of anything else to capture popular attention, a story is likely to run and run. Until, on Friday, Arday apparently killed himself.

***

The obvious party to blame, for some, is journalism. The writer Matt Haig published an Instagram post calling on Andy Burnham to change the law so journalists would face “consequences” for “the reckless damaging of people’s mental health via the media”. (Incidentally, I once wrote a critical piece about Haig which he flagged up to his followers, who then subjected me to one of the more vicious and unpleasant pile-ons I have been through. But I suspect my mental health isn’t the kind that counts here.) Press regulation advocates have used it to renew calls for Leveson 2, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Arday had already used the law to suppress journalism. Authoritarianism is in the air.

Being at the centre of a media storm is isolating and horrible. Arday had lost his job, lost his credibility, and even those he might have banked on as supporters were abandoning him: The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch wrote a column that was probably more brutal than anything from The Telegraph or The Spectator, which accused Arday of gulling his defenders and exploiting his autism as a cover for his actions. Ostracism is deeply destructive. I don’t think that Arday’s life was beyond redemption (if the Winns could survive The Salt Path, he could survive this), but I can understand why he might have believed it was.

There are other things that can be hard for a human to bear. Losing face, for example. In 1969, the sailor Donald Crowhurst disappeared during a round-the-world race. He had been woefully underprepared for the challenge, but desperate to succeed: he had pinned both his family’s finances and his own reputation on completion. Understanding the frailty of his craft, he secretly abandoned the race, hiding out in the Atlantic Ocean and reporting false positions for several weeks. His plan, which was very nearly successful, was to pick up the race route at a convincing moment.

But the isolation and the pressure and the shame took their toll on him. One of his final logbook entries reads: “I am what I am and I see the nature of my offence… It is finished — It is finished — IT IS THE MERCY.” Shortly after writing that, he (presumably) stepped overboard. It was suicidal in the first place for Crowhurst to enter the race (after his disappearance, entry criteria were tightened to exclude overambitious amateurs like him). But what killed him, in the end, was his own psychological inability to turn around and acknowledge his errors.

Suicide is a complex and terrible kind of violence. The most palatable way to interpret it is as a rational reaction to a suffering so great, only oblivion can end it. But the act of suicide affects everyone the suicidal person is connected to: Arday’s decision to kill himself has inflicted unimaginable pain on his family, and especially his children. Suicide can be an act of revenge (“They’ll be sorry…”). It can be an act of control: think of criminals who kill themselves rather than face the judgement of the courts. It is also rarely a simple response to an obvious trigger. While I take seriously what Louis Appleby says about how the strain of being the world’s main character will have affected Arday, I’d also point out that the majority of the coverage was about the institutional issues rather than Arday personally.

Arday is easier to defend now he can be cast as a martyr to the cruelty of the right-wing press. Alive, he had become an embarrassment — in Afua Hirsch’s word’s, “the stick the right will use to beat back racial equality”. Dead, all his faults can be forgiven. He can be, once again, the high-flying black scholar who defied the obstacles of structural racism and his own disabilities. His reputation is restored. All the difficult questions he represents about university recruitment, educational standards and general gullibility can be gratefully set aside.

I do not regret writing about Arday, but I am sorry for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about. If the plagiarism in his PhD had been dealt with at the time; if Cambridge had vetted his work; if his publisher had factchecked his manuscript and done him the kindness of rejecting it; if the allegations of his academic malpractice had been dealt with openly in the specialist press, rather than hushed up until they became a legitimate scandal — then maybe Arday would have been spared the punishing glare of a public life.

But he wanted it so much. One of the embarrassing qualities of Great and Unfortunate Things is the number of people Arday claims to have encountered who prophesied his greatness. I do not believe that, for example, he met a woman in a Brazilian favela who told him he had a special destiny. I do believe that Arday wanted this to be the truth, and he pursued it, ill-equipped though he was, into the wide-open ocean, fabricating the record of his journey as he went. The unluckiest thing to happen to him was his own success in getting what he thought he deserved.

• If you need help or support over suicidal thoughts, please contact the Samaritans.