Our friends at the Good Law Project

[Gymnopedie]

I know this doesn't belong here but given the bollocks from the GLP about issues that do I thought people might be interested.

It's about Professor Jason Arday, a Cambridge academic. The story started when there was a claim that large chunks of his PhD thesis had been taken from another (sometimes not even changing typo errors) published a few years earlier. His justification is that he's autistic and his way of coping is 'mimicry'.

Sine then his many claims about his charity work, fundraising and physical exploits have come under increasing scrutiny - much from the Guardian - and are unravelling fast. He's having to backtrack and 'explain' a lot. He's claimed to have been on a TV programme that he never was and it was chronologically impossible for him to be on it. He has claimed a lot of nasty harassment but has no evidence of it, no photos, no messages, and didn't report any of it to the police. (Well he claims he did once, but the police have no record of it and the story doesn't stack up.)

What does the GLP have to do with it? They're organising an open letter in his support, claiming that there is nothing to see here except that he's a victim of vile racism.

Support for a left wing cause that bears no relationship to the facts? Where have I heard that before?

Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor (The Telegraph via MSN)

Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor | University of Cambridge | The Guardian

Glasgow University denies Jason Arday visiting prof claim | The Herald

YY exactly.

Wow, the tax barrister doth protest too much, methinks 🤣

Who did suggest it such as it got on the news?

The BBC referred to tweets by Barbara Rich (ex barrister) saying that GLP were fundraising

So he’s ranting on the news about Barbara Rich’s tweet? Sounds whipped up from nothing.

This false narrative is growing and growing. It will obliviate any nuanced and truthful discussions of how and why a vulnerable man was permitted to perpetuate his fantastical stories.

By the way. Found an anecdote about when he took silk via Blocked and Reported Reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/1v9rbec/comment/p0h45oh/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=2&utm_content=share_button

I have met Jolyon Maugham. For some reason I was invited to his taking silk (becoming a Barrister) party about 11 or 12 years ago. . It was one of the most achingly generically privileged White Leftist evenings of my life. Almost funny. Almost sad. Breathtakingly irritating. Enormously pompous. Enlivened by the unexpected arrival of his father- a old rake in pointed slippers who genially undermined all his son’s pronouncements from the ante room he was banished to.

He comes across as deeply unpleasant in that interview.

Its a shame the BBC didnt do just a little research, and asked why the article had a big yellow donate button on it and whether this was nudging people to donate to GLP.

Oh yes I remember reading that!

Has anyone asked him about the edits (multiple) to the petion to remove signatures and Simon Baron Cohens comment that he was misrepresented? See THAT has more actual news and basis

There's a quote from Jolyon's father, David Benedictus, in his Wikipedia entry regarding the authorised sequels he did for the Winnie the Pooh books

What's the worst thing that can happen, that I'll be torn apart by wild journalists?

So, yesterday there was a vigil held for Jason Arday, organised by "Stand up to racism", attended by up to 30,000 people. Is this an attempt (as in the George Floyd case) to beatify a person, who we know to be a liar, cheat, fantasist and plagiarist?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ceqe87lelvgo

It's amazing that 30,000 people attended that. The more I read about Arday, the more he seems like an obvious conman. It's possible that his deceptions met the criminal threshold for fraud. The idea that 30,000 people think that what happened to him was all a result of racism - and feel so strongly that they'll actually attend a rally about it - is very depressing.

yeah I think it's quite clear we have these self-organising automobs on both sides and this lot is a perfect example of one side of that. I mean this lot are mostly the kind of people that I think of as my people, to be fair.

Then you've got the other lot that are being whipped up into some kind of REMIGRATION NOW frenzy by cynical grifters the like of Tommy Ten Names and Nepo Baby Nige. These lot are not as much my people but my town and county are full of them - I drink elbow to elbow with them and generally get on as long as they don't get bloody started. Even places like Scotland where there's a lot of pride that 'we urnae like that' there are local offshoots of that ilk gaining traction.

The enshittification of the internet is only getting worse and it seems that having access to the sum total of human knowledge in your pocket is not a superpower at all. Social media silos and self-perpetuating myths are rife.

edit to remove hanging phrase from pre-post editing

BBC article says 2000 or more, not 30,000.

From the BBC article

Shadow housing secretary Sir James Cleverly said he was angry about what happened to Arday, and the university establishment - not just Cambridge - should have "done the robust due diligence and checking that should happen with any senior academic appointment".

Speaking to the BBC's Today programme, he said he felt Arday was used as "bragging rights by some universities", and that people spoke of his "age and his ethnicity rather than his talent".

Sir James - who was Britain's first black home secretary and foreign secretary - said much of the coverage surrounding Arday was "quite possibly" motivated by racism, but that the questions over plagiarism were legitimate, regardless of motivation.

The BBC article does report tempering words from Sir James Cleverly, that show that there is an alternate narrative.

They follow this up with statements that imply the the plagiarism was discovered by Nathan Cofnas who the University fired for being a racist.

The plagiarism row began after another academic - self-defined "race realist" Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024 - said he found numerous instances of plagiarism in the professor's work.

Cofnas's post had been terminated amid a backlash to his view that under a true meritocracy black people would "disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment".

From my reading, the accusations of plagiarism were made much earlier, by others and were actively suppressed by the University using the police and lawfare. As written, the journalist could claim that they were not talking about the story in general but that the current row began with Cofnas.

Is it too much of a conspiracy theory to think that journalists at the BBC might have deliberately obfuscated the narrative so that it aligns with their personal truth?

That's quite a big discrepancy.

Yes, I took the figure from the Guardian article and then posted the BBC link. Brain fade at this time in the morning is worrying.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/17/tens-of-thousands-pay-tribute-jason-arday-trafalgar-square-vigil

Where did "Rest in Power" spring from?

Well yesterday the BBC news at 6 was only reporting on the plagiarism with no mention of the rest of his lies however by this morning they were mentioning the plagiarism and personal achievements so someone has clearly complained about the blatant misrepresenting of the facts. That they are lieing about who 1st brought up the plagiarism and the way Arday responded to them is no surprise

I'm not sure it even needs a conspiracy. The BBC journalist may simply not be aware that anybody could run the the plagiarism checks used by Nathan Cofnas.

DH ran the thesis through some checks a few weeks ago when the story hit mainstream media, and yes, plagiarism was immediately spotted. He is an academic in a different field, but he has extensive experience of useless over-promoted colleagues who can't teach the course material or set coherent exams. They usually have the sense to award high grades so the students won't complain (unlike the other sort of useless colleagues – the ones who misjudge the course level and get too many failures). Usually the department will let the situation drift, and just count the years until the dead weight either retires or moves to sunlit uplands elsewhere, aided by a glowing reference. Nobody wants to rock the boat.

Where does the figure of 30,000 come from? It's not mentioned in the article and there certainly don't look to be 30,000 people in the photo. Even if 30,000 did attend, that's not that many in the broader context.

I also wouldn't be worried about the "narrative". It's the likes of Diane Abbott and Jolyon who are spinning it, and the vast majority tend to be sceptical about what they say.

Anyone following this story knows full well what fantasies Arday had been inventing and they would know that the media articles about him were hardly harassment. It will be even worse for his "legacy" when his book eventually comes out in the UK.

The 30,000 is from the Guardian

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Trafalgar Square in London to remember and pay tribute to Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who died on Friday.

Stand Up to Racism, which organised the vigil, estimated that 30,000 mourners had gathered in the square

Stand Up to Racism, which organised the vigil, estimated that 30,000 mourners had gathered in the square

To slightly misquote Mandy Rice-Davies "Well they would, wouldn't they?"

The line being peddled by Arday's defenders is that "it was only a bit of plagiarism, lots of academics are guilty of plagiarism, and they don't end up having 200 articles published in the media about them, therefore it's all racist."

Firstly, I feel deeply depressed at this desire to minimise plagiarism, as if it isn't a serious issue, particularly in a Cambridge professor.

But secondly, why do they keep ignoring the rest of the story? The lies about not speaking till age 11, about not being able to read or write till 18, the marathons, the £5m fundraising, the brain tumours, the epilepsy, the stroke, the attack by a gang of teenage boys that left him in a coma, the pig's head delivered to his home, and so on (those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head). It can only be deliberate - but why are people so desperate to delude themselves?