Beege has a story up this morning hitting some of the highlights of the Jason Arday story. One story worth returning to involves a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE) who was investigated by the Metropolitan Police after he sent Jason Arday a handful of questions.
Reporter Jack Grove narrated his own story in a piece published yesterday. It started in February when the police left him a voicemail.
I was shocked to hear it was from the Metropolitan Police, asking me to call them back. Why? Nothing remarkable had happened to me in the previous year. When I rang back the officer explained a complaint had been made against me regarding the University of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, but the matter was now closed.
But it was important, the officer explained, that I didn’t contact him again, because it was affecting his mental health...
...maybe my journalistic pursuit of this story was too “incessant”, as Arday has claimed, hounding him about details on his personal biography that had little bearing on his academic role, as he suggested.
The details that seem to have troubled Arday had to do with his ultramarathon running. It turned out there was no evidence these runs had happened at all.
In fact, prior to the letter that garnered a response from his solicitors, I submitted only three polite emails directly to Arday over the course of two months, asking about suspicions raised by multiple professors about plagiarism or odd data in his 2018 Social Sciences paper, then a further one about discrepancies in his CV and, finally, when and where his much-vaunted running achievements and charity activities took place.
Phrased very politely, these emails were factual: there was almost no evidence, I said, that he had completed any of these runs, particularly the 600 miles in six days slog. That feat, according to one YouTube talk, took place between Edinburgh and London in 2013 but there was no record of it, despite lesser runs gaining acres of publicity in local and national news.
So, rather than answer the questions, Arday called the police and claimed he was being harassed. And for some reason the police spent another four months looking into this. Today, the MET commissioner offered an apology for that.
Oops! Mistakes were made for four months!
I should just add at this point, that this is not the first time the Metropolitan police have apologized for investigations they had no business spending any time on. Remember when a gaggle of officers showed up at the airport to arrest comedian Graham Linehan over some statements he'd made on X? Five officers dragged him away and subjected him to an interrogation based on this:
If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) April 20, 2025
That case became an international laughing stock and once again MET commissioner Sir Mark Rowley agreed the police probably shouldn't have been involved.
Sir Mark said his officers "had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed," but that police more broadly had "been left between a rock and a hard place" when investigating online speech.
He continued: "I don't believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position."
Despite him saying that, it was another six weeks before the case against Linehan was formally dropped.
Finally, I was wondering yesterday whether or not Arday's autobiography would still be published next week given the questions about his personal story that have erupted this week. There's still no news on that front. The book is still coming out. But there is some remarkable news about what Arday was reportedly paid for it.
In a previous interview with the Guardian, Arday said Simon & Schuster had offered 1.4m for the book in a “pre-empt”, a type of deal in which a publisher is so keen on a book they put in a high offer to take it off the table before it can go to auction...
One senior publisher said it was an utterly mad number, but that “madness sometimes happens”, so it was conceivable. They said a book such as Arday’s would normally be expected to sell about 5,000 copies, so with £2 of royalty per copy, that equates to an advance of £10,000, not 1.4 million dollars or pounds.
Someone quoted in the story suggested that maybe Simon & Schuster was going forward with publication in hopes of recouping the advance, but how? They have no hope of getting that money back and never did. Even if the book sold 100 times as many copies as expected, they still would not break even. And given what happened this week, they'll be lucky to sell 5,000 copies.
If you want to hear more about what's in the book, the Times of London has a review up.
Great and Unfortunate Things is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe. Extraordinary claims are made with no supporting evidence. Arday’s story — regardless of its authenticity — feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals...
One notable feature of the book is what it omits. Several of Arday’s more incredible achievements are either not mentioned, or included in a softened form. His adolescent football career doesn’t figure, and nor does the 600 miles in six days challenge. His remarkable fundraising achievements are alluded to, but no definitive figure is given. Perhaps his co-writer, Eve Claxton, did a little judicious factchecking...
There are, however, some new additions to the Arday canon. The brain tumour, for example — treatment for which caused him to lose his memory just before his viva, so he had to relearn his whole thesis from scratch. He also writes that he was severely beaten at the age of 18 by four youths in an unprovoked attack, causing him to have lifelong seizures.
Arday is not a man to hold a grudge, though. In fact, he’s such a liberal paragon that he made a victim personal statement pleading for lenience. “I wanted them to focus on their education and move forward with their lives,” he writes, nobly. (In another instance of Arday’s bad luck, I could track down no contemporary news report of the crime or the court case.)
It sounds fantastic, with an emphasis on the fantasy. Everyone involved in making this happen deserves a round of applause.
Update: Unleash the Jason Arday memes!
Jason Arday is one of the most talented, honest, decent, intelligent human beings I know.
— Climate Warrior🐬 #ClimateJustice🇵🇸🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 (@ClimateWarrior7) August 4, 2026
This is a photo of us together on top of Everest. We climbed Everest 18 times to raise money for blind Palestinian orphans.
Jason didn't even use oxygen. That tank on his back? That's for… pic.twitter.com/e0mKwZ3JYM
Say what you want about Jason Arday, but you'll never take away the 3 SEC titles and Heisman Trophy he won for the University of Cambridge Fightin' Dons https://t.co/XD5POHxGUh pic.twitter.com/zi4uhIEVwO
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) August 5, 2026
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