It was promoted as a ‘vigil’ for Jason Arday, but it wasn’t grief that united the large crowd that gathered in Trafalgar Square last night.

‘Racism within the mainstream media is responsible for Professor Arday’s death’ read a large sign held below the entrance of the National Gallery. Other signs read ‘249 articles in 22 days’ – a reference to what many people claim was the media’s racially motivated obsession with Arday – and ‘unalived by a witch-hunt’. Stand Up to Racism – the group that organised the vigil – had produced placards stating ‘Rest in Power Professor Jason Arday’. From the outset, the atmosphere was combative and indignant.

It became more so as the speeches began. Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the Labour MP for Clapham and Brixton Hill (the Arday family’s local MP), told the crowd that the late Cambridge professor hadn’t so much killed himself as he had been killed by the media. Arday, she said, was the victim of a ‘media onslaught’ that was ‘relentless, merciless, wicked’, carried out by ‘vicious, evil people’. Photographer Misan Harriman accused the media of ‘gleefully enjoying racialised harassment’ in its reporting of Arday. ‘Justice must be served’, Harriman added. ‘The impunity of the fourth estate must stop.’

The supposed bigotry of the media – the Spectator and the Telegraph were singled out to loud boos and cries of ‘shame’ – was the main target. Labour MP Diane Abbott said a ‘vicious media’ had ‘driven [Arday] to his death’. Simon Woolley, principal at Cambridge’s Homerton College, went even further. He said Arday’s suicide was a ‘lynching’ and a ‘public assassination’. Veteran activist Patrick Vernon said Arday, in his death, had joined the pantheon of modern black martyrs that included Stephen Lawrence and George Floyd.

The vigil had the shape and feel of a Black Lives Matter protest. And in essence, that is what it was. Stand Up to Racism’s Weyman Bennett told the crowd to ‘never surrender what our ancestors fought for’. Before performing an odd rendition of ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay, the musician Jermain Jackman urged his fellow ‘black kings and brothers’ to chant ‘I am great, I am loved, I am smart’.

On the question of Arday’s plagiarism, the answer appeared to be simple: it wasn’t true, or was greatly exaggerated. Vernon praised Arday’s ‘scholarship’ and ‘achievements’. Another speaker celebrated Arday as an ‘extraordinary academic’ and an example of what was possible when ‘talent, determination and opportunity come together’. Dawn Butler, another Labour MP, told the crowd that ‘when we say his name, do not miss out the “professor”’. The message was clear: under no circumstances could Arday – who was routinely hailed as a ‘once in a generation’ genius – have his academic bona fides questioned.

Looming over the event was the almost wholly fictitious account Arday had presented as his ‘life’ to his various employers and in his recently published memoir. This was an aspect of the Arday affair that no member of the audience, and certainly no speaker, wanted to touch. The avoidance of Arday’s repeated and extreme lies was perhaps unsurprising. It would, after all, have been an admission that this tragedy was not as simple – ‘a campaign against all of us’ in Abbott’s words – as the organisers were so eager to make out.

Was it racist to question whether Arday had run 600 miles in six days, as he had claimed? Was it relevant that Arday’s apparent health battles – his non-verbal autism, his brain tumour, his testicular cancer – were likely all fabrications? Did it matter that this celebrity academic at Cambridge had never single-handedly raised £5million for charity, as he originally claimed? Or that he had never been a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University in the US or Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, despite what his CV said? And why did he claim he played football for Crystal Palace and won great sums of money as a snooker champion? Was none of this relevant to the media interest in his life?

Other inconvenient facts were also glossed over in what felt like an effort to instill a collective amnesia. There was predictably no mention of the fact that Arday had hired one of the UK’s most expensive law firms, Carter-Ruck, to silence his critics. Or that he’d prompted the Metropolitan Police to investigate a journalist from Times Higher Education who raised questions about Arday’s plagiarism last year.

The death of Jason Arday is undoubtedly tragic – but those at the vigil made no attempt to understand why his life unravelled. In blaming the media for his demise, they ended up deifying a fantasist, who saw no way out when he realised the game was up. The only things served by this spectacle were the forces of genuine reaction – of racial grievance-mongering and the authoritarian quest to silence the free press.

Jason Arday is dead and the ‘racist’ mainstream media killed him. That was the message of a vigil in Trafalgar Square last night, as thousands gathered to pay their respects to the disgraced Cambridge professor who tragically took his own life on Friday. It is also untrue.

We must make no bones about saying it. Because in the ‘anti-racist’ canonisation of Arday – whose awful death came after his own untruths, his plagiarism and fabulism were laid bare by the press – we see a kind of derangement that some vainly hoped had been and gone with Peak BLM.

The vigil on the steps of the National Gallery was the IRL expression of a sentiment that has been swirling on social media since the devastating news of Arday’s suicide broke: that he was hounded out of Cambridge by blood-thirsty journalists desperate to ‘lynch’ a young black man.

The tone was religious, in the fire-and-brimstone sense. ‘We are going to stand against the wicked, evil people who dragged his name through the mud’, said Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, from the stage. Lord Woolley – founder of Operation Black Vote and veteran ‘anti-racist’ leader – called the journalists who exposed Arday ‘the dogs of hell’.

Arday’s death, said Woolley, was a ‘public assassination’. A member of the crowd corrected him: ‘A lynching!’ ‘A lynching!’, repeated Woolley. I was standing about 10 feet away as he said all of this – blood-curdling, inflammatory lies not from a students’ union activist, but a deputy vice-chancellor of Cambridge and peer of the realm.

Woolley was a good friend of Arday. They sat together in his final days. Arday’s nearest and dearest are certainly entitled to their grief – their anger, even. What they can’t do is smear journalists for telling the truth, while expecting us to swallow their falsehoods. Indeed, in the tragic story of Jason Arday, there has been far too much of that already.

The narrative now being forged, both online and off, goes something like this. Arday was a young professor, minding his own business, when the media suddenly decided to take him down. He was accused of plagiarism, then ‘exonerated’. But still they kept on coming, so furious were they that a black man was given a perch at Cambridge.

He has been turned into a spotless figure, martyred by a vicious media. The problem is, this isn’t true. More than 100 passages were found in his PhD, apparently lifted from another’s thesis. He was also credibly accused of falsifying data, of lifting quotes from academic papers and passing them off as original quotes from people he had interviewed.

Then there is his personal story – from claims about running ultra-marathons to claims he was the subject of racist intimidation – which also collided with reality. Police directly contradicted his version of events. Experts pointed out that his alleged sporting achievements would, if true, make him a record-breaking athletic specimen. School friends even challenged his claim he was mute as a child.

I take no pleasure in repeating all this. But the truth matters. Indeed, had Cambridge refused to participate in the fantasy land Arday was constructing for himself, had it listened to academics and higher-education journalists who began raising the alarm years ago, and who were met with legal threats and police probes for their efforts, Arday might never have become the story of this long, hot summer.

The attempt to turn Arday into a saintly victim of a racist press is obnoxious on so many levels. A man’s suicide is being used as a platform on which to pursue pre-existing political agendas, from shackling the press to shoring up the rotten, racist ideology of DEI – which insists academic standards must be lowered for ethnic minorities to thrive.

If anything, the fall of Jason Arday was set in motion by DEI. So captured was Cambridge by this warped, phoney form of ‘anti-racism’ that it elevated a man who might have sounded all the right notes about ‘white supremacy’, but whose lies, or perhaps delusions, were always going to be exposed eventually, bringing his world tumbling down.

Everyone in possession of a pulse wishes Jason Arday, the man, were still with us. To say he erred is not to say he wasn’t a cherished friend, colleague, family member – a human being. Suicide touches far too many lives as it is. The thought of anyone making that worst and most final of decisions grates against our humanity. But the myth of Saint Jason is an affront to reason we simply cannot indulge.

Disposable barbecues, of all things, have found themselves in the firing line after Andy Burnham’s government temporarily banned their sale over wildfire fears. Fair enough, you might think. It’s probably a good idea to refrain from firing up a tray of burning charcoal in tinder-dry woodland during an extreme heatwave.

However, the ban does fit a much less benign pattern of political-class policymaking. The humble disposable barbecue and attendant cook-up seem almost uniquely designed to offend chattering-class sensibilities. These barbecues are cheap, ubiquitous and associated with meaty, boozy, spontaneous fun.

It’s easy to paint a bit of a romantic picture of Brits cooking outdoors: a £5 barbecue from the supermarket, sausages and burgers, ketchup, mayo, crisps, a crate of lager or a box of wine, children running about, someone burning the onions, smoke getting in everyone’s eyes. Possibly a touch of rain. Possibly an irate father fumbling with the matches, trying to get it all started in the first place. Possibly an errant frisbee or football, and hopefully an overly excited dog chasing around and trying to pinch food. A proper British picnic barbecue, in other words, of the kind we used to have on the beach when I was a boy.

It’s quite gloriously ordinary and highly accessible. Much like the pub used to be, before smoking bans came in and eye-watering taxation drove the cost of a pint upwards (I paid £11 for a Weissbier and a kid’s apple juice in a silly hipster place the other day). You don’t need a garden of your own, an expensive outdoor kitchen, or a reservation at a BBQ gastropub. You just need a patch of grass, a few bits from the shop, a match and a few mates or family members.

Frustrated as I often am by the black squares of burned grass you often see in the local park after a sunny day, I would be sad to see the disposable barbecue go. It would be yet another example of the distinctly puritanical attitude of our governing class towards everyday pursuits, especially those enjoyed by the lower-middle and working classes.

Smoking damages your health and burdens the NHS. Drinking, we are increasingly reminded, has no safe level. Meat is bad for the planet. Cars pollute our cities. Cheap flights pump carbon into the atmosphere. Sugary foods make us fat. Bonfires dirty the air. And now even the humble barbecue, disposable or otherwise, can be understood primarily as a source of wildfire risk, pollution and unnecessary emissions.

Taken individually, there is truth in most of these arguments. But piled one on top of another like this, we see a certain worldview developing. Almost every ordinary pleasure now seems to arrive with a moral debit column attached. Whatever we enjoy, somebody is waiting nearby to calculate its cost to our bodies, the NHS, the environment or society at large. The old Roundheads worried about sin. The new puritans worry about externalities.

Our parents and grandparents inhabited a world in which grown adults were largely expected to make their own calculations about minor risks (though, of course, they weren’t always as aware of the risks as we are today). They regularly drank in pubs. They smoked, grilled meat, drove to the seaside, lit bonfires, let off fireworks and let their children disappear off into the local park without a second thought.

Some regulation has undoubtedly made life better – drink-driving wasn’t doing anyone any favours. But we seem to have moved from regulating obvious harms to regarding risk itself as something the government ought to save us from. There always seems to be a grey man with a clipboard somewhere telling us no.

There is an obvious class element to all of this. Wealthy people can typically buy more ‘respectable’ versions of the kinds of pleasures everyone gets lectured about. Eco-tourism takes the place of short-haul package holidays; driving is done in brand-new electric SUVs; disposable barbecues aren’t needed, because expensive outdoor kitchens in large gardens are ready to hand. Working-class versions of these pursuits attract the greatest disdain, while elite consumption gets a convenient pass.

The disposable barbecue is a perfect symbol of the kind of everyday enjoyment the new puritans so hate: cheap, unbranded and uncomplicated, it simply lets ordinary people enjoy themselves.

Human existence cannot be reduced to longevity, carbon budgets and the minimisation of risk. It should not be. Some things are still worth doing, even if they are physically unhealthy. We eat good food instead of throwing back supplements and greens shakes – sometimes we eat too much of this good food. We also sometimes stay up too late to watch a good movie or go for drinks with old friends. Small excesses like these are not unfortunate glitches in otherwise well-managed lives. They are a part of what makes life worth living, to get a little cliched and sentimental for a moment. They fill our souls. And, honestly, the content of our souls is absolutely none of the government’s business.

Prudence has a large role to play in the good life. We owe due care to our neighbours, and we have a duty of care to what we inherit and what we will pass on. But prudence is not abstinence, and living well isn’t the same as living as safely as possible. No grey man with a clipboard should be able to dictate your vanishing blink of a life on this great rock of ours.