DARREN LEWIS: ‘Everyone ought to face scrutiny in Cambridge professor Jason Arday CV row’
Have you ever lied, or inflated the truth, on your CV? Reed, Britain’s biggest recruiter, revealed last year 60% of the career histories it sees “have some form of error”.
The ex-MP Jeffrey Archer falsely implied he’d had an MA from Oxford University. Nor did he have six O levels and three A-levels. He’d left school with three O levels, and no A-levels. And no, his dad wasn’t a war hero, as he’d suggested. Archer senior was a bigamist who fled to New York in 1914 to escape fraud allegations. Archer became Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party and remains a life peer.
Jason Arday is the Cambridge University professor who quit his post this month after concerns of plagiarism, embellishment and his academic credentials. To be very clear, this isn’t a column defending anything established to have been indefensible. Or to even suggest he gets a pass because others did.
Jason is a good person (I’ve met him) who will be well aware that his conduct demands accountability, amid the questions that continue to come thick and fast. It is important, however, to provide context, and human to defend fiercely his right to an emotional wellbeing.
It is also important to note this issue is complex and goes way beyond him. A minority of critics have, for example, weaponised it to justify their warped view that all Black people in senior public life are there solely because of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). One instigator of the Arday inquiries published a blog post two years ago arguing that in a true meritocracy, Black people would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment. A penny for the thoughts of Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Labour’s Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh on that.
Actually, the current controversy shows even white liberals – in this case Cambridge, who also have questions to answer – have the power to decide which world Black people are allowed to thrive in … or not. Even the more progressive companies are back to a near-total dominance of one demographic across positions of leadership and influence. Look across the judiciary, the arts, academia, media, politics and even sport. Nepotism and networks continue to masquerade as meritocracy. The idea that anything threatens that orthodoxy is for the birds.
Before Boris Johnson ’s ascent to No10, his former editor from his time as a journalist, Max Hastings, famously vilified him in a newspaper column. “I was Boris Johnson’s boss” he wrote, “he is utterly unfit to be prime minister”. How’s that for a reference? Hastings added: “Johnson would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade.”
Quoting philosopher Bishop Berkeley, Hastings went on: “It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public”. Johnson cruised into Downing Street and presided over a shameful chapter in this country’s history few, not least the families bereaved by Covid, would look back on with fondness. Labour’s ex-Chancellor Rachel Reeves worked at the Bank of England for around five-and-a-half years and not “a decade” as she had previously suggested.
Last September, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s claim that she’d been offered a place to study medicine in the US at Stanford was challenged – by Stanford. Labour’s Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds apologised last year for saying he’d worked as a solicitor when he’d never qualified. Green Party leader Zack Polanski’s campaign literature claimed he’d worked for a “justice assessment committee” at the Ministry of Justice. No such committee or direct employment existed.
Reform MP Robert Jenrick’s website was forced to correct claims he’d been “the joint youngest Cabinet Minister since the Second World War, tied with Harold Wilson and William Hague” when he was made Tory Housing Secretary in 2019.
Again, none of this is to suggest that Arday should escape accountability. It does, however, suggest few of us are in a position to cast the first stone.
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