Our friends at the Good Law Project

"We have donate buttons everywhere (two on every page, including that one) but they're non-specific so don't count". They just want you to give them money and let them spend it however they want.

Gordon Bennett. What a load of waffle. I doubt that many of his supporters will have the attention span to get to the end of that.
...I did not want to fundraise in connection with Professor Arday’s death whilst it was still so raw...
So what is he saying here? The plan was to wait a few days and then fundraise in connection with his death?

"But the scope of our work is broad and our inboxes feel like a bottomless pit of human misery – from Black academics and other professionals, victims of sexual violence, trans people, whistleblowers and on and on"

Thank goodness for the broad scope of their work. Just think of the non-practicing KCs who might need access to funds because they got themselves involved in a spot of legal bother when they said something unwise about another barrister.

I do think that a lot of it is very funny. Private Eye couldn't do better.

But were we really listening to his opinions on Brexit?

Great to see how much the fox calmed down when he realised his rescuers weren't wearing Kimonos

Well I wasn't because, despite voting Remain, I was of the opinion that Brexit had to mean Brexit once the referendum result was in!

GLP are also running a state of the nation poll.

This was linked by his pal and test case trans activist Sophie aka pot noodle on Bluesky, so might add Bluesky cookies if you click on it?

https://bsky.app/profile/goodlawproject.org/post/3mtyaurkgxi2d

Is the UK heading in the right direction? 🤔

We want to know what you think! Tell us 👇
^goodlaw.social/kn91^

That's the bumpf over, now on to the meaty stuff

Methinks he does protest too much. And I can't believe that he wedged in his "anti trans" obsession into his burble about his grim behaviour as he leapt on the Arday bandwagon

"We are profoundly worried about the use of the US driven anti-trans playbook to target Black people"

Some people have no shame.

Black is trans by default now?

The split of ethnicities is fascinating. So many choices if you are white and Irish (White EU Citizen, White Irish and White Northern Irish!) but not so many choices if you are Black or Asian. If you are Black/Asian and not British you are just going to have to content yourself with 'other'.

They seem to be confusing ethnicity and nationality.

Not dissimilar to Nathan Cofnas's use of the phrase 'black people' to cover people from a huge range of ethnicities and cultures. I wonder what GLP would think of the comparison with Cofnas.

And what if you don’t get your news via social media? What do click on in their poll then?

And why isn't Mumsnet an option?😁

I was surprised!

You could say Other and type it in?

Yes, that's exactly what he says: "Despite all of this, Professor Arday’s death was very fresh and I told colleagues I did not want us to fundraise off the back of our letter to the Prime Minister. We would fundraise later, but not immediately."

So basically just leaving a polite gap between griping and grifting.

I admit I didn't make it to the end of the GLP's statement, but this bit about Jason Arday's last few days

His family, friends and those of us, including me, who had been fighting to keep him alive were devastated.

Aside from the vainglorious way it's written (as though he was some heroic surgeon), if they knew Arday was dying, or more likely a danger to himself, wtf didn't they actually get him admitted? I know Arday seems to have told a lot of lies but did none of his friends believe him either if he was saying he wanted to die?

His family, friends and those of us, including me, who had been fighting to keep him alive were devastated.

Translation
Someone I hadn't even heard of until a few weeks earlier. Who didn't want to come out into crowds with me, so I left him to it and buggered off to the cricket.

That statement (about the removal of the 'donate' button) is infuriating. So full of "I am never the one who is in the wrong" twistiness and post hoc rationalisations that it reminds me of the end stages of a couples argument, where one party eventually gives up out of sheer exhaustion.

Is he really saying that the "senior colleagues" who had been instructed by him, from the start, not to fundraise on the back of the Arday events, had felt it fine to keep the 'donate' button on the petition page, but then not fine to keep it on the blog page? And then it was just some hapless "junior colleague" who wrongly inferred a need for consistency between pages??

'Fighting to keep him alive ' basically = 'fundraising for myself using him and then inviting him to a cricket match'.

Absolutely outrageous.

Does he even for one second realise that 'demanding a public enquiry' into JA's appointment and subsequent downfall might have been exactly what JA would never want?

Ardays memoirs are published today. They've removed the bit about him running 30 marathons in 30 days and are selling it as a subjective sort of thing.

There are Arday truthers out there

https://monkdebunks.substack.com/p/the-media-frenzy-that-stripped-jason

Thanks for sharing - I think this might have been on X previously? Or a very similar deep dive using WayBack Machine etc. The comments on X were more robust, pointing out that the local newspapers were just reporting what Arday told them (because that's what local newspapers do) rather than some truly independent evidence.

Those photos have been circulating for a while and with the undisputed evidence of olympic torch bearing I, and I suspect many other people following this, knew he was a good runner in his youth. That doesn't negate e.g. fundraising totals being so massively inflated over the years. Or his other inflated claims and plagiarism.

Helen Lewis in the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/jason-arday-innocence-racism/688408/

In death, jason arday has become two people. To many readers of legacy newspapers, the late Cambridge University academic is a proven fabulist. The life story on which he built his career, of being nonverbal until 11 because of autism, and then learning to read at 18 and becoming a professor, has “no precedent in medical literature,” as The New York Times delicately put it. Among many other extraordinary claims, his tale of being menaced by a knife-wielding man at Cambridge could not be corroborated, and neither could the story that his family had received a pig’s head as an act of racist intimidation. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he told a Guardian reporter who challenged him."

"That is one reality. However, another one dominates left-wing new media, activist nonprofits, and visual social networks such as Instagram and TikTok. There, the prevailing narrative is that Arday did nothing seriously wrong and Britain’s right-wing media hounded an exceptional Black scholar to his death on August 14 for no reason except racism. Well-wishers have raised more than $300,000 for his family, and made his upcoming memoir a best seller in Britain. At a rally in central London held in his memory, attendees carried placards reading rest in power professor jason arday, even though he had resigned the title days before his death. They wanted to make clear their belief that he was unfairly deprived of his academic status."

I think the 300k is being raised by a member of the house of lords rather than Jolyon. Though I'm sure he's keen to offer help on how to manage it