“Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor”, writes the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare.
Bakare has made strenuous efforts to be fair to Arday, but, alongside the extensive evidence of plagiarism and the extreme physical unlikelihood of Arday’s claim to to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, ten of those days with a hairline fracture in his leg, the pattern of behaviour Bakare describes below is difficult to explain away:
In an open letter to the government minister Jacqui Smith in July 2025, which outlined Arday’s experiences, he claimed to have been “threatened with a knife, physically assaulted and spat on; [had] rape and death threats being made to him and his family; bananas and bullets being posted to him via the university campus; and corrosive substances and mutilated animals sent to his family home”.
In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.
The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.
The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.
He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
and
Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.
In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.
He’s going down, and the only remaining question is which of his gullible academic sponsors he will drag down with him.
Imagine a serious scholar who happened to be black – such a person would have great difficulty being employed by Cambridge, especially if they were a conservative.
But this person – with the dreadlocks, and the dressing like a tramp (in spite of being well paid), and the general “performance artist” conduct – he was employed, even though his thesis was as copied as the thesis of Martin Luther King (who, supposedly, wrote a thesis about some German theologians – in spite of not being able to read German, and his thesis being the same, sometimes word-for-word, as that of someone else at another university – was treated as a coincidence).
Cambridge did not want a serious scholar who happened to be black (that would have been “boo-hiss” non racist, not wonderful “anti racist”) – they wanted to make a point, and they have – but perhaps not the point they wanted to make.
The truth, you Nazis, is a white supremacist concept and needs to be decolonised from the curriculum.
Is there any evidence to back up his childhood developmental issues? What evidence is there that he couldn’t read or write until he was 18? According to his Wikipedia page he graduated his first degree in 2008, when he was 22 or 23 (Wikipedia doesn’t even have a precise date of birth for him, just a year). So one is to believe a developmentally challenged individual managed to go from being utterly illiterate at age 18, to being able to complete a degree course inside 4-5 years? I mean its possibly doable if you are some sort of planet sized genius, but is there any subsequent evidence the man is genius level intelligence? From what I’ve read his work appears to be trite borderline garbage (I know sociology has a low bar here).
There are utter fantasists out there. I personally knew a guy who claimed to have been in the Marines for a decade or more, served tours in NI, fought in the Falklands, and then fought as a mercenary in Africa. I’m a credulous guy, I took it all as face value, why would someone lie about their entire life? Yet it slowly emerged it was all complete BS. He was just using stories from books he’d read to give himself a completely false life story (he was in his 60s). For me the penny dropped when he told a story about how he was in the Marines with a guy whose surname was Bailey and how this chap had a very big dick, and they called him Plunger Bailey. I immediately recognised that from Spike Milligan’s wartime memoirs. After that I started asking other people about him, and they’d discovered all manner of other inconsistencies in his tall tales. When someone confronted him about it all he just disappeared from everyone’s lives.
I do feel a bit sorry for Arday though, he’s obviously been indulged for so long I suspect he probably now actually believes he’s some sort of genius. All his life people have been lying to him about his abilities, and indulging his fantasies. Thats going to be a difficult thing to accept, if he ever can.
David Starkey, one of the leading historians of the Tudor period, was driven out of Cambridge (and exiled from the BBC and so on) for saying “bloody blacks” (in passing) on a podcast during Covid.
That shows the atmosphere – watch every word you say, or you will be forced out.
If that is the attitude of universities, and it is, then it is not worth while for them to continue – time for them to close down. Ditto every other institution that demands that everyone in it watches every word – and forces people out for just one example of bad language.
The correct response to David Starkey would have been, from a black man, “well at least I am not a bloody sodomite” – Starkey would have laughed at that (being a homosexual), but anyone who used that language would have been forced out as well.
“Watch every word you say, make a slip and you are over” – that is the motto of the modern world.
Jim – the man is an ass, I almost ADMIRE him – as I like tall-stories. But someone should not get a academic post on the basis of telling wild lies – about everything.
Tom – correct the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth is “whiteness” which must be exterminated.
“Whiteness” has nothing really to do with skin tone – it is really about modern Marxist swine (Frankfurt School “Critical Theory” Marxist swine) in the institutions wanting to wipe out “capitalist” society.
They do not care if an airline pilot can fly an aircraft, or if a brain surgeon knows anything about medicine, or if a bridge builder knows anything about engineering, and-so-on – because, to them, everything is “Power Relations” – “exploiters and oppressors” versus “exploited and oppressed”.
As even “Stalin” understood – if the Frankfurt School types (the “Woke” as we call them today) take control, then society will collapse – utterly collapse.
“Stalin” (like other Classical Marxists) wanted to rule over a functioning society – but the “Critical Theory” Marxists will leave nothing (nothing at all) worth ruling over.
According to Wikipedia(!):
And yet the concept of destroying the existing society is far more seductive and powerful than the mundane creation of a replacement society. Indeed there is a certain seductive yet unconvincing concept that after destruction a socialist utopia will magically arise.
You might argue that a socially conservative set of systemic power relations is awful – but perhaps it is the least awful set of systemic power relations available?
Anyone else reminded of what happened with Jussie Smollett a few years ago – particularly Dave Chapelle’s comments?
It is hard to remember now that communism promised better outcomes than capitalism by eliminating the waste of failing start-ups and twenty-five types of deodorant etc. Once that was conclusively proved false the communists said through gritted teeth at least it was fairer. And that wasn’t true either.
I woke up this morning, read this piece and was immediately reminded of Chapelle’s take on Jussie Smollett. But I see Simon Jester beat me to it. Chapelle is a national treasure, and his Smollett routine is comedy gold for the ages. I believe ‘The Goodies’ (RIP, Bill Oddie) holds the distinction of being the only comedy show that actually had a viewer die laughing while watching it, but this piece came close for me.
But back to seriousness for a minute – remember, Smollett’s hilarious fabrication was taken 100%-seriously by the entire panoply of the great-and-the-good. He continues to insist that it is largely-true. Many people continue to assert that something like what he alleges really occurred. Claudine Gay was exposed as a serial plagiarist, yet continues as a professor at Harvard at an absorbent salary, and so on. Why are we surprised when a person who has practised increasing levels of fabulism for years decides to try and see just how far he can take it? I’ll wager that he is actually somewhat-surprised himself at just how much he was able to sell a willing auduence.
There’s a guy in the US called Don Shipley, a retired Navy SEAL, who has a YouTube channel that does nothing but investigate and expose individuals who claim to have been members of this highly-elite special-warfare unit. Despite the fact that such claims are usually laughably-easy to verify, he still has no trouble finding one or two people a week to debunk. The urge to fabulism is ever-strong, partly-because it’s human nature and partly-because it’s been amply-shown that if you can find the right stories to tell, many people in many arenas of human endeavour will fall all over themselves to not question your claims in any way.
llater,
llamas
The most amusing aspect of all of this is that the Cambridge leadership, Simon Baron-Cohen and other academics who were taken in were gulled because every one of them is a dyed-in-the-wool racist, treating Arday like a talking dog rather than as a human being. The racism of lowered expectations taken to spectacular levels.
@Marius – with all due respect, I don’t think you describe the sutuation completely. I very-much doubt that Professor Baron-Cohen was ‘gulled’ by Arday – after all, his own brother makes a very-good living by tricking others with unbelievable tales, so he’s hardly-likely to accept tall tales at face value. I doubt he’s that gullible, or many of his colleagues, either.
I suspect that it’s much-more likely that they all had their doubts, but kept them very-much to themselves because a) casting doubt on Arday’s stories would open them up to just the sorts of accusations that are being thrown at Arday’s critics now, and b) Arday was (and is) faithfully parrotting the current party line on race, class, oppression and privilege, so it doesn’t really matter too much what stories he told to reach his current position.
Ockham’s Razor works both ways. To believe that all these people were gulled, you have to believe they are all that gullible, and I’m not sure I believe that. I think, on balance, that they all more-or-less knew, it’s just that they didn’t care too much, as long as he kept saying the “right” things and nobody rocked the boat.
Which is worse – I could not say. We shall see. Remember, Jussie Smollett still insists on the truth of his story, and many people still believe him.
llater,
llamas
Correction – his own cousin, not his brother. My bad. It’s early here.
llater,
llamas
The shocking thing to me about the behaviour of the Great-and-the-Good is that they are apparently so detached from contemporary media culture as to fail to recognise that being canvassed by The Good Law Project was the perfect tip-off that it was time to make their excuses and back out.
Marius & llamas,
The weird thing is that Simon Baron-Cohen has been willing to depart from the woke consensus in some respects. He wrote a book called “The Essential Difference – Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain”, which I have read. It argues robustly that, on average, men’s and women’s brains are different. Differences in behaviour between male babies and female babies can be observed in babies who are one day old. This argument was unpopular among those who claim that such differences are entirely created by societal expectations – Read the 1-star reviews of the book on Goodreads.
Paul Marks, re this “Jim – the man is an ass, I almost ADMIRE him – as I like tall-stories. But someone should not get a academic post on the basis of telling wild lies – about everything.”
That strikes me as absolute gold, something we could not achieve without the help of such as Arday, namely, showing the Academy’s true colors, in their full glory, in the town square, broadcast to the entire Universe, and in a way the Academy can never deny. But of course they will.
Llamas, same for the Smollet/Chappelle episode–and yes, Chappelle is one of humanity’s greatest treasures.
@Natalie Solent – well, now I’m so confused. I’ve been reliably informed by the ‘trans’ lobby that men and women DO have different brains, that the differences are obvious and demonstrable, and that children as young as 2 or 3 can determine these differences in themselves. Surely nobody can argue with such obvious truth?
llater,
llamas
I thought the point of the trans thing is that boys and girls do have different brains, it’s just that sometimes a boy’s brain finds itself in a girl’s body, and vice versa. This surely makes perfect sense.
By the way, I have a bridge to sell, any takers?
GregWA – you are correct Sir.
Jason Arday and Cambridge have, unintentionally, done the world a great service – they have exposed what a SCAM academia has become.
I love the fact Natalie included her article under the “Science Fiction & Fantasy” & “Sports” categories 😀 😀 😀
@llamas – Hopefully some journo will ask… “So, Sir Simon, regarding the Arday affair, are you a mug or a coward?”
Thanks, Perry – I’m always chuffed when someone notices an “Easter Egg”.
My own favourite among my occasional non-standard uses of Samizdata categories came with a post about Nicole Hannah-Jones getting ratioed on Twitter.
“I’ve tagged it “self-ownership” because it’s a self-own. Sue me.”
Arday isn’t as embarrassing as Ward Churchill was. At least Arday really is black.