The Jason Arday ‘vigil’ was a witch-hunt against the press

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.