“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?