Anybody who’s anybody in 2026 has some connection to DEI. Merit is so passé. When I were a lad, “girl power” belonged to Margaret Thatcher, sainthood was the preserve of Mother Teresa, and Welsh choirboys sang like Aled Jones. Fast forward four decades, and you’re lucky to get away with Diane Abbott at the Despatch Box, George Floyd in the vestry, and Axel Rudakubana on vocals.
For years, the plan seems to have been to max-out the victimhood card in order to build the ultimate DEI hire - the Ilhan Omar model, if you’ll permit me. Pocket rocket though she may be, Ilhan fits a lot under that hijab: black, female, Muslim, immigrant, anti-western, anti-capitalist, anti-American, anti-Jew, and (apparently) “progressive”.
The Quest for the Holy Grail never ends however, and a few years back I thought the modelling industry had cracked it. In 2018 they unleashed Aariana Rose Philip upon us: the world’s first black, trans, quadriplegic, cerebral palsy sufferer (and notably not particularly attractive) model. For a while there, Philip couldn’t find a magazine that wouldn’t put him/her on the front-page, nor a catwalk runway he/she wasn’t welcome to zoom down in his/her wheelchair.
It is unto this scene that Professor Jason Arday has entered stage right, his rictus grin almost a dead giveaway that he can’t believe he’s getting away with it. What Ilhan is to politics and Philip is to modelling, Arday certainly is to academia. What is unusual about Arday, is the victimhood package he’s opted for. Combining the disparate talents of George Abaronye (sub-par Oxbridge entrant, identity politics, dreadlocks), Claudine Gay (discredited plagiarist, nevertheless kept on at Harvard), and Jussie Smollett (hate crime hoaxer), Arday must have thought he’d hit the trifecta. That’s the best buy one, get three free Cambridge University ever invested in. The autism / illiteracy was also a nice touch.
Having refused to go the full Ilhan Omar (eschewing the obvious trans, BLM, reformed jihadist clichés), Arday compensated with fantastically unverified feats of athleticism and largesse (5.5 million quid charity work, ultra-marathons with a broken leg, candlelit studies with a brain tumour, starring in Seven Up two decades before birth, and unconfirmed rumours that he gave birth to Greta Thunberg with neither anaesthetic nor womb).
That such a con could be pulled off outside of a Whitehall farce is one thing. That it was encouraged (and possibly orchestrated) by our highest seat of learning, indicates the depth of the DEI depravity to which Britain has now sunk. Yet the most revealing part of the whole affair is not Arday himself, but the man Cambridge chose to punish instead.
Queue Nathan Cofnas, the man who is to DEI what Fred West is to childcare. The self-declared “race realist” was sacked by Cambridge University back in 2024 for the crime of pointing out that, in a genuine meritocracy, the number of black professors at elite universities would approach zero. Cambridge’s hiring and defence of Arday proves his point, far more elegantly than any paper could. The great irony is that Cofnas did much of the heavy-lifting which finally exposed Arday’s plagiarism. And indeed, Cofnas rejects calls for Arday’s dismissal, stating: “He was hired to represent DEI, and he’s doing a great job.”
Predictably, the liberal establishment’s furore in this affair is reserved for Cofnas himself. The letter in support of Arday, in the face of the “racial smear” the plagiarism accusations amount to, continues to garner signatures - even post-exposé. Cambridge meanwhile, has preferred to describe the growing scrutiny as a ‘vile campaign’ rather than address the substance of the allegations. Not content with creating one Frankenstein, the university appears to have manufactured two: the man they promoted, and the man they punished for being right.
At what point do we consider the possibility that the DEI racket is nothing short of a pisstake? A game of dare, where the challenge is to get away with the most ridiculous appointment - because the honkies won’t dare call it out? We’d better hope that Arday is peak DEI - because if he isn’t, what comes next is going to be even uglier. Prepare yourselves for Shamima Begum as Mother of the Year, Anjem Choudary as Labour’s Jewish outreach officer, and (God forbid) Lenny Henry lauded for services to comedy.
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Frank Haviland is the Editor of The New Conservative, and the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West.
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