The Jason Arday farce is an embarrassment to black Britain

I’ll admit it: initially, I pulled my punches. I feel pity for Jason Arday. It must be awful to have every detail of your life picked apart by the media class during ‘silly season’ because there is nothing else to write about. For me to have to add to the commentary is a matter of profound regret.

However, sympathy cannot become an excuse for waving away allegations of plagiarism and dishonesty. When the story broke, Britain’s progressive establishment instinctively circled the wagons. I watched friends and prominent figures rush to defend him, and I even considered adding my name to a high-profile open letter. As a black voice who has faced attacks from both left and right, I understand that reflex. Yet the Arday affair has exposed something darker than a culture-war skirmish: an identity politics that compels intelligent people to subordinate the pursuit of truth to tribal loyalty.

It now seems the black establishment is quietly abandoning Jason Arday. By chance, I was attending a launch party of a prominent black Briton’s book on Saturday – the very day the Guardian published its devastating piece on the affair. Moving through the room, I listened to hushed, furious exchanges among well-heeled black Britons. I spoke with people who had signed that open letter. Some had defended Arday on the airwaves (some as recently as that very morning). Others had penned pieces suggesting he was the victim of a conservative hit job. Almost to a person, they were mortified. As smartphones flashed with links to the story, one attendee put it with cold clarity: ‘Arday has lost the Guardian!’ The reflexive instinct toward racial solidarity had collapsed into acute embarrassment.

Look at the roll call of Arday’s initial supporters: Oxbridge college heads like Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu (who has now removed her name from the open letter), Lord Simon Woolley and Sonita Alleyne, alongside political and media figures like Lord Paul Boateng, John McDonnell, Zack Polanski, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Nels Abbey, Professor Kehinde Andrews and Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu. I count many of Arday’s supporters as personal friends, and I know them to be people of profound decency, kindness and integrity. They saw a man under fire, an underdog. Their generous impulse to protect him has been weaponised.

The tragedy is that Arday didn’t need to make any of the claims that are now coming under scrutiny. Appointed professor of sociology of education at Cambridge at just 37, he was the university’s youngest black professor. He was also celebrated for overcoming severe developmental challenges, learning to read only in adulthood before reaching an Oxbridge chair. If these elements of his biography are true, then this alone is an extraordinary human achievement.

In an analysis of his 2015 PhD thesis, the Telegraph alleged last month that dozens of passages had been lifted almost word for word from another scholar’s dissertation. It also found text and interview quotes that seemed to match previously published studies. Then came a cascade of questions surrounding Arday’s seemingly tall tales: millions raised for charity with few verified records and extreme athletic feats normally only seen among professional athletes. There were also the blood-curdling threats he supposedly faced, including a knife-wielding intruder in his faculty building and a pig’s head sent in the post to his parents’ home. Although Arday claimed the police had investigated the pig incident, the Met told the Guardian that this was ‘categorically’ incorrect and no investigation had taken place. When pressed by the Guardian on why he presented such claims to the world, Arday offered a telling response: ‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.’

If the allegations against Arday are true, this would place him in the same hall of mirrors as Belle Gibson, Rachel Dolezal or Anna Delvey – figures who exploited an establishment so desperate to endorse a trendy narrative that asking for proof was treated as poor etiquette. Of course, bad-faith actors have rushed to exploit the wreckage. Nathan Cofnas, whose Substack post brought the plagiarism allegations to global attention, no doubt believes the Arday case confirms his view that, under a true meritocracy, black people would ‘disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’.

But the existence of bad-faith agitators can’t excuse us from confronting the rot: the patronising assumption is that standards and truth are optional when evaluating a black professional. This is a slap in the face to the 160 or so black professors in Britain today who earned their chairs through gruelling intellectual labour, original research and the unglamorous grind of academia.

It’s also an insult to the civil-rights titans who forged the path before us. Pioneers like Doreen Lawrence, whose unyielding pursuit of justice transformed British policing; Dr Harold Moody, who founded the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931; Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor; and visionary educator Dame Jocelyn Barrow. These giants didn’t demand to be recognised based on sentiment. They forced a hostile establishment to respect them because their work was bulletproof.

The ultimate casualty of the Arday scandal isn’t one man’s career, nor the bruised egos of those who rushed to his defence. The tragic reality is that Jason Arday has potentially done far more damage to black Britons than any racist agitator ever could. External critics and bad-faith actors can only ever attack from the outside – their prejudices are expected, discounted and easily identified. But Arday’s unchallenged rise, if the allegations turn out to be true, has handed our harshest detractors the ultimate weapon. It provides a silver bullet to anyone looking to roll back equality legislation or widening-participation schemes, or to question every rightful appointment and call professionals like me ‘diversity hires’. No external opponent could ever inflict as much damage as this case potentially has.

I think of my own sister, an Oxford graduate who earned her place through raw intellectual horsepower. I think of the thousands of brilliant black students pushing through Russell Group universities and successful careers right now – people who hold themselves to exacting standards and ask for no free passes. Those lining up in Arday’s defence send the patronising message that black achievement cannot survive the harsh light of objective scrutiny.

Even so, perspective matters. It is worth remembering that Jason Arday hasn’t killed anyone, a point he made himself recently. I have pre-ordered Arday’s book, Great and Unfortunate Things, and look forward to reading it – even though I’ll now treat it more like a fantasy than a non-fiction.

Albie Amankona is a broadcaster and financial analyst, best known for his work on Channel 5, BBC, ITV and Times Radio. Follow him on X: @albieamankona.