The Canonization Of Jason Arday And The Death Of The Free Press

Last September, a young man named George Abaraonye greeted the assassination of Charlie Kirk with a message to his fellow Oxford students: “Charlie Kirk got shot, let’s f*cking go.” At the time, he was the incoming president of the Oxford Union, the world-famous debating society that trained a sizable chunk of Britain’s prime ministers, and it took a two-thirds vote of its members to remove him.

This week, the same young man published an essay entitled “They’re killing black boys at Oxford and Cambridge,” in which he rails against “mob justice” and warns journalists that they “will not be clean from this sin.” The man who whooped at an actual, literal assassination has appointed himself Britain’s foremost authority on the sanctity of life.

His subject is Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor whose remarkable résumé (visiting professorships that three universities say never existed, 30 marathons in 35 days, an invented book, cancer that was testicular in the pitch for his memoir, which turned to brain cancer by the time it made it into the book itself) collapsed after three weeks of scrutiny, and who resigned.

On Friday, Arday was found dead at his home in London. He leaves behind two children, and his death is, of course, a tragedy. The grief lasted about five minutes before the political operation began.

On Monday night, a crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square in London for what was billed as a vigil. Placards read “unalived by a witch-hunt.” The Labour Member of Parliament, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, told the crowd that it was the media that killed him. The veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott blamed a “vicious media.” Simon Woolley, the principal of a Cambridge college, called it a “lynching” and a “public assassination.” The veteran activist Patrick Vernon inducted Arday into a martyrs’ pantheon alongside George Floyd. The ambition could not be plainer: Britain is to have its own George Floyd moment, and this time the officer in the dock is the free press.

London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, condemned the press for “pernicious public shaming.” The bestselling author Matt Haig demanded that Prime Minister Andy Burnham end a world in which journalists “face zero consequences” for their reporting. Hacked Off, Britain’s perennial press-regulation lobby led by Hugh Grant (who has never forgiven the press for highlighting his…penchant for ladies of negotiable affection), called for a state framework of “genuine press accountability.”

Campaigners now want a public inquiry into the coverage and a law to “cap news coverage of any individual within a set time frame.” They are already calling it Arday’s Law. Meanwhile, the progressive activist group, the Good Law Project, gathered signatures for a petition insisting the allegations against Arday were “entirely false,” which will come as news to the three universities that denied Arday’s claimed professorships on the record.

Americans might assume that Britain’s Left has always been this squeamish about politicizing a death. Not quite. Five weeks ago, when the veteran conservative politician Ann Widdecombe was brutally murdered in her own home by way of blunt force trauma to the head, we were sternly instructed that drawing political conclusions from a killing was ghoulish, and that decent people wait for the facts. That commandment has now been suspended. Politicizing the murder of a conservative is not allowed, but doing so for the suicide of a progressive icon is now totally fine.

Set aside the hypocrisy and examine the principle actually being demanded: that true, newsworthy stories must not be published in case their subject harms himself.

This rule would hand every fraudster, embezzler, and lying politician a veto over his own exposure, and the more theatrically fragile the wrongdoer, the stronger his protection becomes. Arday himself demonstrated how such a veto works in practice. When a retired professor raised questions about his research, Arday reported him to the police. A journalist who investigated him was likewise reported to Scotland Yard, and his editors heard from Britain’s most feared libel firm. Suppressing scrutiny was the strategy all along. His mourners simply want it placed on a statutory footing.

The pressure is already telling. Aaron Bastani, co-founder of the left-wing outlet Novara Media, bravely and legitimately criticized Arday during the scandal, but has now had to recant on camera: “Professionally I erred, but ethically I really screwed up.” The aforementioned Diane Abbott (who once confidently asserted that Chairman Mao did more good than bad) used the vigil stage to smear the academics who first questioned Arday’s work. Universities are circulating messages offering support to students frightened by the coverage, as though reading a newspaper were a form of trauma. The struggle session is well underway, comrades!

Americans have seen this film before. In 2020, the death of a flawed man was transmuted into a national reckoning: institutions knelt, cities burned, and dissenters learned to whisper.

But if the Left have their way today, even whispering truth will become a literal crime. We must not allow this to happen to a free press.

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James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.