I lament Jason Arday’s apparent suicide. I shake my head at the dreadful pity of it. Yes, he had been serially dishonest. And yes, the immediate responsibility lay with him: the hand that killed him was his own. Yet his death was still a tragedy. He’d become so trapped in a fantasy about himself, it seems, that when reality finally broke in, Nemesis came with it. A terrible reckoning caused the self he’d invented to disintegrate. It must have seemed to him that black nothing remained.

But Jason’s responsibility is widely shared. It also belongs to all the adults who indulged him. Who failed to make him reckon with the truth. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of racist bad faith. Who, year after year, aided and abetted the elaboration of his fantastic claims. Who patronised him.

Why did they do it? For many, no doubt, because uncaring kindness was so much easier than telling the truth. For some, evidently, because their own academic standards were hardly higher than his. For others, because he was a useful poster boy for their ‘decolonising’ crusade.

But is it credible that not one of the seasoned teachers or academics who vetted him in the course of his career failed to see what is now so glaringly obvious – that the emperor was stark naked? I think not. I’d wager a modest fortune that some did see it, but knowing what it would cost them to say so, suppressed the thought and bit their tongues. Why? Lest they be accused of racism, their friends step away, and their careers suffer.

There’s a warning in this sorry tale for the leadership of the Church of England. The Church commissioners, including both archbishops, persist in their support for ‘Project Spire’, the policy of devoting £100million to paying reparations for the church’s alleged profiting from transatlantic slavery. Reliable sources tell me that the project has been vigorously championed among the commissioners who are responsible for managing the church’s assets, including the First Church Estates commissioner, Alan Smith. They also observe that the decision to proceed with the project was made in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the consequent anti-racist, knee-bending panic. Apparently, only one of the commissioners’ 27 board members voiced an objection to it. Was that because all the others were convinced supporters? I know for a fact they weren’t. So why didn’t more doubters speak up? Could it have been – as an eye-witness reports – that dissent was suppressed, because senior church figures are concerned about being branded racist?

My own ‘lived experience’ tells me that’s entirely plausible. Sometime during the Covid epidemic – late 2021 or early 2022, I think – I was invited to join in a Zoom call to discuss the Church of England’s responsibility for making slavery reparations. Of the four people present, three (including me) were white. The fourth was a black clergyman. Most of the meeting was taken up with him and me arguing. I remember pulling my punches, partly because my view of the historical and ethical nonsense of reparations was not as clear and firm as it is now. But mainly because I was aware of how bad I would look if I said what I honestly thought. In the current, emotionally manipulative climate, when claims of racial harassment are so easily made and readily believed, it’s very risky for a white person to speak up candidly to a black person about race and slavery. So, I tied my tongue.

Since its public launch in January 2023, the wheels have come off the rationale for Project Spire. Richard Dale, an historian of international banking, has shown that the commissioners misunderstood the data: the 18th-century church fund, the Queen Anne’s Bounty, neither directly invested in nor profited from slave-trading. I, until recently holder of the Anglican world’s premier university chair in Christian ethics, have pointed out the astonishing failure of the commissioners to publish any considered ethical justification. And Charles Wide KC has exposed their failure of due diligence in launching the project before discovering that it’s beyond their lawful powers to divert money from resourcing the Church of England’s ministry to supporting black-led businesses in the Caribbean and Africa.

How have the commissioners and the project’s officers responded? Mainly by retreating into a bunker and saying as little as possible, hoping no one will notice the fuss and the critics will tire and go away. But also by complaining that forensic questioning is a form of harassment and refusing to answer it. By indirectly threatening critics with litigation. By refusing to name them. And on one (aurally recorded) occasion, by publicly defaming them as deliberately spreading disinformation – that is, lying. Recently, Bishop Arun Arora, deputy chair of the church’s Racial Justice Board and public champion of Project Spire, has gone to the desperate length of invoking in its defence the authority of none other than Alan Lester. ‘Desperate’, because Professor Lester is no expert on transatlantic slavery and, in my long experience of him, his rational mouth is more gum than teeth.

I am a Christian convert. I’m an active member of the Church of England. I’m even an Anglican priest. I wish the leadership of my church no ill. But they’re stubbornly leading us into our very own Arday affair, where the nakedness of Project Spire will be exposed for all to see and those responsible for stewarding the church’s assets will be called to public account. I know that the reputational costs of rowing back will be high, but the costs of rowing onward will be much, much higher. Commissioners – and bishops, clergy and laity – who’ve been harbouring doubts and biting their tongues need to muster the courage, take the risk and speak up now. Before it’s too late.

Nigel Biggar is a Conservative peer, Regius Professor emeritus of moral theology at the University of Oxford and author of Reparations: Slavery and the Tyranny of Imaginary Guilt (Swift, 2025).

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.