Jason Arday is dead and the ‘racist’ mainstream media killed him. That was the message of a vigil in Trafalgar Square last night, as thousands gathered to pay their respects to the disgraced Cambridge professor who tragically took his own life on Friday. It is also untrue.

We must make no bones about saying it. Because in the ‘anti-racist’ canonisation of Arday – whose awful death came after his own untruths, his plagiarism and fabulism were laid bare by the press – we see a kind of derangement that some vainly hoped had been and gone with Peak BLM.

The vigil on the steps of the National Gallery was the IRL expression of a sentiment that has been swirling on social media since the devastating news of Arday’s suicide broke: that he was hounded out of Cambridge by blood-thirsty journalists desperate to ‘lynch’ a young black man.

The tone was religious, in the fire-and-brimstone sense. ‘We are going to stand against the wicked, evil people who dragged his name through the mud’, said Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, from the stage. Lord Woolley – founder of Operation Black Vote and veteran ‘anti-racist’ leader – called the journalists who exposed Arday ‘the dogs of hell’.

Arday’s death, said Woolley, was a ‘public assassination’. A member of the crowd corrected him: ‘A lynching!’ ‘A lynching!’, repeated Woolley. I was standing about 10 feet away as he said all of this – blood-curdling, inflammatory lies not from a students’ union activist, but a deputy vice-chancellor of Cambridge and peer of the realm.

Woolley was a good friend of Arday. They sat together in his final days. Arday’s nearest and dearest are certainly entitled to their grief – their anger, even. What they can’t do is smear journalists for telling the truth, while expecting us to swallow their falsehoods. Indeed, in the tragic story of Jason Arday, there has been far too much of that already.

The narrative now being forged, both online and off, goes something like this. Arday was a young professor, minding his own business, when the media suddenly decided to take him down. He was accused of plagiarism, then ‘exonerated’. But still they kept on coming, so furious were they that a black man was given a perch at Cambridge.

He has been turned into a spotless figure, martyred by a vicious media. The problem is, this isn’t true. More than 100 passages were found in his PhD, apparently lifted from another’s thesis. He was also credibly accused of falsifying data, of lifting quotes from academic papers and passing them off as original quotes from people he had interviewed.

Then there is his personal story – from claims about running ultra-marathons to claims he was the subject of racist intimidation – which also collided with reality. Police directly contradicted his version of events. Experts pointed out that his alleged sporting achievements would, if true, make him a record-breaking athletic specimen. School friends even challenged his claim he was mute as a child.

I take no pleasure in repeating all this. But the truth matters. Indeed, had Cambridge refused to participate in the fantasy land Arday was constructing for himself, had it listened to academics and higher-education journalists who began raising the alarm years ago, and who were met with legal threats and police probes for their efforts, Arday might never have become the story of this long, hot summer.

The attempt to turn Arday into a saintly victim of a racist press is obnoxious on so many levels. A man’s suicide is being used as a platform on which to pursue pre-existing political agendas, from shackling the press to shoring up the rotten, racist ideology of DEI – which insists academic standards must be lowered for ethnic minorities to thrive.

If anything, the fall of Jason Arday was set in motion by DEI. So captured was Cambridge by this warped, phoney form of ‘anti-racism’ that it elevated a man who might have sounded all the right notes about ‘white supremacy’, but whose lies, or perhaps delusions, were always going to be exposed eventually, bringing his world tumbling down.

Everyone in possession of a pulse wishes Jason Arday, the man, were still with us. To say he erred is not to say he wasn’t a cherished friend, colleague, family member – a human being. Suicide touches far too many lives as it is. The thought of anyone making that worst and most final of decisions grates against our humanity. But the myth of Saint Jason is an affront to reason we simply cannot indulge.