The Jason Arday story has ended in unspeakable tragedy. Yesterday, Arday was found ‘unresponsive’ at an address in south London. His death was unexpected, but is not being treated as suspicious, say the police.

He was just 41 years old. What devastation his family and friends must be feeling. The heartbreak. The lack. We can only hope they are now left to navigate their grief with some measure of quiet, peace and dignity.

Meanwhile, everyone else is left to work out how we got here. If the past 12 hours are anything to go by, ghoulish identitarians seem intent on rewriting history, drawing all the wrong lessons, and using a troubled man’s untimely death as a springboard to dunk on their opponents.

Last week, Arday resigned from his professorship at Cambridge University, following mounting allegations that he had plagiarised large sections of his PhD thesis, fabricated personal achievements, lied about racist intimidation he had suffered at Cambridge, and perhaps even exaggerated the extent of his autism in his youth.

Arday was more than an academic. He was a sensation. He guest-edited the Today programme, he was profiled on Good Morning America, a blockbuster memoir was in the works, all off the back of his incredible story – from a poor, illiterate, ‘neurodiverse’ boy to an all-conquering academic, ultra-marathon-runner and charity fundraiser.

And for Cambridge, he was a totem. When he was appointed in 2023, as a professor of sociology of education, Arday was presented as the embodiment of ‘the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education’. Thus, his mere presence was proof that Cambridge was committed to ‘doing the work’ of demolishing the ‘structural racism’ that supposedly lurked among its ancient stone and lush lawns.

I repeat all this only to stress that this was a story – the thrust of which has been curiously omitted from many of the initial write-ups and accusatory ‘commentary’. For all the putrid bile on social media about this being a ‘public hounding’ led by a ‘right-wing reactionary media’, it all began with fellow academics, and a reporter at Times Higher Education, who dared to raise questions about Arday’s thesis, only to have the police called on them.

Arguably, the most devastating exposé on Arday was published in that noted hard-right outlet, the Guardian, establishing that his claims about a pig’s head being left at his parents’ door and being menaced with a knife in his faculty building were not borne out by the evidence.

Does the Guardian have ‘blood on its hands’, too? Is it wrong for journalists to expose the lies and wrongdoing of prominent public figures at elite institutions? Of course it isn’t. I dare say many of those throwing these accusations around don’t care one jot about Arday, or have paid much attention to this story at all. They are simply the sort of people who never let a horrific tragedy get in the way of scoring the cheapest of political points; who are all too happy to use a corpse as a soap box.

It’s also fascinating to see the identitarian left apparently so exercised about the horror of public shamings. After all, these are people who will join pile-ons, sign open letters, call for people to be sacked, and happily ruin their lives, even when the target in question has done the sum total of nothing wrong – people who say men can’t become women, for instance, or once told an off-the-cuff joke at a conference, or failed to delete some jokey, old tweets before taking up a plum new position. Do not not take any lectures from these vultures.

The journalists and dissenting academics did their job, because the Cambridge higher-ups didn’t do theirs. They chose to believe Arday’s story, because it furnished their worldview and lent them some pious PR. They rebuffed the allegations, until it was impossible to do so (Arday’s resignation came within hours of Cambridge finally announcing an investigation into his record). They put him on a pedestal, from which he was always going to be knocked off. Not because he was black, but because he was a fraudster and a fantasist, elevated by an academic system that has come to reward dazzling tales of victimhood, even outright lies.

This is what we mean by the cult of DEI – the racial elite ideology that has left a trail of injustice, and now tragedy, in its wake. There are the brilliant black academics who have been reduced to tokens, or dismissed as ‘coconuts’ when they utter the ‘wrong’ opinions. There are the students and academics who don’t belong to a ‘protected’ group, passed over for opportunities and promotion. And now there is the late Jason Arday, a man who became trapped in his own fantasy land, indulged by those who should have known better.

I won’t say Cambridge has blood on its hands, but it does have a lot to answer for.