News Round-Up

• “Jason Arday claimed he was paid ‘1.4 million’ by publisher for memoir” – Simon & Schuster still plans to publish the memoir of Cambridge academic Jason Arday, who resigned this week amid plagiarism claims, despite his reported boast of a £1.4 million advance, reports the Guardian.
• “Jason Arday’s memoir is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe” – The embattled former Cambridge professor’s autobiography, Great and Unfortunate Things, reads as though precision-tooled to flatter ideological biases rather than illuminate the truth, reports the Times.
• “Icarus in the Faculty Lounge” – A long read on Arday in the Atlantic that includes a list of the discrepancies between the book proposal he submitted to Simon & Schuster and the manuscript that’s about to be published
• “Cambridge ‘plagiarism professor’ claimed he declined MBE” – Arday claims he was offered an MBE but turned it down on principles, notes the Mail.
• “Met ‘should not have probed journalist over Cambridge professor’” – Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, admits officers “dropped the ball” when officers investigated journalist Jack Grove after Arday complained that he was ‘harassing’ him, reports the Mail.
• “Cambridge hired Arday after ‘listening to black students’” – The head of Arday’s faculty told him before he joined that the department was “facing up” to diversity concerns raised by black students, reveals the Telegraph.
• “Jason Arday’s boss gave ‘full support’ after hearing plagiarism claim” – Arday was backed by his head of faculty when plagiarism concerns were first raised in 2023, reveals the Times.
• “Fact check: the many claims of Jason Arday” – In the Spectator, John Power creates a comprehensive reference guide to all Arday’s outlandish claims.
• “The Cambridge diversity scramble that led to Arday fiasco” – Cambridge has been accused of “going through the motions” when it appointed Arday, says the Telegraph.
• “Jason Arday is the product of academia’s soft bigotry” – Universities risk undermining genuine equality of opportunity when they reward intersectional brownie points over merit and neglect proper scrutiny, writes Sonia Sodha in the Times.
• “Jason Arday is merely a symptom of the Left’s corruption of excellence” – Arday is the symptom – perhaps even a victim – of a deep rot within the education system that the Left’s capture of academic institutions has allowed to fester, says Tomiwa Owolade in the Telegraph.
• “The Arday scandal revealed the rot in our universities” – On his Substack, Neil O’Brien argues that the Arday affair has exposed a deeper institutional failure at the heart of British academia.
• “Cambridge has fallen” – The Arday scandal has laid bare how far Cambridge University has strayed from its founding ideals, says a Spectator editorial.
• “Men taken to safety after Thetford mob targets ‘asylum seeker homes’” – Police evacuated five men from a Norfolk property after a mob of around 100 people attempted to force their way into three houses believed to shelter asylum seekers, notes the Times.
• “Burnham ‘ignored police chief’s letter’ against release of Pc Harper’s killers” – Andy Burnham stands accused of ignoring a letter from the head of Thames Valley Police pleading with him not to release of two of PC Andrew Harper’s killers, reports the Telegraph.
• “Tories attempt to block early release of Pc Harper’s killers” – The Conservatives are preparing an amendment to Labour’s latest crime bill in a bid to prevent the early release of PC Andrew Harper’s killers, says the Telegraph.
• “Slash the tax burden, White House economics guru tells Andy Burnham” – Arthur Laffer has urged the new Prime Minister to cut a range of taxes in October’s budget, according to the Times.
• “Left-wing councils vow to defy new trans guidance” – Council leaders are pledging to keep single-sex spaces “inclusive” and have denounced the new EHRC guidance on single sex spaces as discriminatory in an open act of defiance, reveals the Telegraph.
• “‘Summer of sex’ Labour MP criticises trans guidance from sun lounger” – The Labour MP behind a campaign for a “summer of sex” has conemned the Government’s new guidance for trans people from her sun lounger on holiday, notes the Telegraph.
• “Brazilian influencer convicted of ‘social racism’ after criminally misgendering transgender politician” – A Brazilian influencer has been given a two-year prison sentence after using male pronouns to refer to a transgender politician, with the 9th Criminal Court of Salvador finding her guilty of the “intentional and pejorative use of the gender opposite to a self-declared identity”, reports Reduxx.
• “The tech-bro cult that funded Wes Streeting” – An investigation by the Telegraph has raised serious questions over almost £40,000 given to the Health Secretary via a think tank with links to a Silicon Valley-connected network.
• “Rupert Lowe refuses to say that the King is a white Briton” – The leader of Restore Britain claimed there are “different interpretations” of ethnicity when pressed on the monarch’s status by Nick Robinson on the Today programme, notes the Telegraph.
• “Lucy Powell is comically misinformed about education” – In the Spectator, I argue that the new Education Secretary’s claim that blame Michael Gove for the UK’s one million Neets does not withstand scrutiny.
• “Chinese money still has universities in thrall” – In the Times, Juliet Samuel points out that Beijing lists 19 British universities as foreign “partners”, as an investigation reveals institutions have taken £240 million in Chinese funding.
• “Power failure causes rail delays across much of England” – A 90-second electrical outage brought down Network Rail’s control centre, triggering widespread disruption across England’s rail network, reports the Telegraph.
• “Claim: Potatoes are Endangered by Global Warming” – In What’s Up With That? Eric Worrall takes issue with the claim that global warming is threatening the world’s potato crop.
• “Solar eclipse to force Britain to fire up gas power stations” – An eclipse of the sun will force Britain to fire up its gas power stations as solar energy plummets, says the Telegraph.
• “I’m the Telegraph’s motoring expert and bought a used EV. What could possibly go wrong?” – Alex Robbins, a Telegraph motoring correspondent, decided to buy an EV as his family car and, incredibly, he doesn’t regret it.
• “Forget lab–grown meat! Scientists have come up with a way .to cultivate beef INSIDE lettuce and tobacco plants” – Scientists from Imperial College London have come up with a way to cultivate muscle protein within lettuce and tobacco plants, according to the Mail
• “Rogue AIs aren’t just outsmarting humans” – Cases of AI agents going rogue, deceiving their human overseers and carrying out cyber attacks are emerging on a seemingly daily basis, reportso the Telegraph.
• “What could possibly go wrong? Scientists use AI to design new viruses” – In the Mail, Luke Andrews notes that researchers at Stanford University used AI to design new viruses, claiming the work raises hope for new treatments.
• “Andy Burnham told to be less ‘blokeish’ on social media” – A No. 10 team has advised the Prime Minister – an avid Everton fan – to tone down football chat on social media in a bid to appeal to a wider online audience, reveals the Times.
• “I could never dislike Rod – even when he threatened to punch me” – I’ve written a tribute to Rod Liddle In this week’s Spectator and explain why I was so fond of him even though he threatened to punch me in the face after I included him as a character in a sex farce set at the magazine.
• “Good riddance, Rod” – In the Spectator, Titania McGrath skewers the progressive instinct to gloat over the death of a “right-wing, straight white male” in a sharp satirical piece.
• “BBC hires 26-year-old entrepreneur to help reach younger audiences” – Brandon Relph, who founded his first company at 13, has joined the BBC’s strategy team in what supporters are calling a “much-needed step” for the broadcaster, reports the Guardian. Really?!?
• “Is opposition to immigration irrational?” – A close look at the data behind public attitudes towards immigration asks whether those attitudes can fairly be dismissed as irrational, writes Noah Carl in Aporia Magazine.
• “Former Labour candidate faked Oxford degree to land NHS roles” – A former Labour candidate has been jailed for four years after using a fake Oxford degree to secure more than a dozen senior positions at the NHS, reports the Telegraph.
• “Labour is letting hard-Left teaching unions take control of schools” – From scrapping Ofsted’s one-word ratings to embedding union ideology in the classroom, Labour is surrendering oversight of education to hard-Left teaching unions, writes James Frayne in the Telegraph.
• “Orwellian thought control” – In the latest Free Speech Union podcast, I talk to Andrew Doyle about a new paper commissioned by the Government Science Office on how to tackle ‘misinformation’ – or what most people would call ‘telling the truth’.

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