Is Jason Arday Sacha Baron Cohen’s Greatest Creation?

Jason Arday, the Cambridge DEI poster boy embroiled in a plagiarism row, boasts a back story so implausible it raises the question: is he, in fact, the latest comedy creation of Sacha Baron Cohen? His extraordinary claims – from running 600 miles in six days to raising £5.5 million for charity – have been accepted without question by universities, the BBC and fellow academics alike. Read my piece about what may be Baron Cohen’s most spectacular stunt yet in the Spectator:

Are congratulations in order for Sacha Baron Cohen? The more I read about Jason Arday, the Cambridge sociology professor and DEI poster boy caught up in a plagiarism row, the more convinced I am he’s the comedian’s greatest creation.

Arday’s academic career, like his athletic achievements, reads like a fairy tale

First, there’s the over-the-top back story. He claimed to have been totally mute until the age of 11 – having been diagnosed with autism – and unable to read or write until he was 18. Yet in spite of these disadvantages, he earned a PhD by the time he was 30 – which he managed to complete while suffering from a brain tumour!

On the face of it, utterly incredible. But it begins to make sense if you think of Arday as an Ali G-like character designed to test the limits of how unwilling white do-gooders are to challenge the claims of black people suffering from ‘intersectional oppression’, however implausible.

And test the limits he has. He chalked up some truly extraordinary achievements in ultra-endurance running, or so he says, completing the 600 miles from Edinburgh to London in just six days – 50 miles short of the world record for ultra-distance running over six days – and 30 marathons in 35 days. During this latter feat, he suffered a hairline fracture on day 21 and, according to him, his leg swelled to twice its normal size. Yet, remarkably, he went on to complete another nine marathons. In all, he maintains, he raised £5.5 million for charity.

All of these claims have been accepted at face value by the four universities who’ve awarded Arday honorary degrees, as well as the BBC, which published a laudatory profile when he became a Cambridge professor. How Baron Cohen must have laughed – assuming I’m right about Arday being a satirical creation. A stunt designed to expose the wilful blindness of hand-wringing liberals has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Arday’s academic career, like his athletic achievements, reads like a fairy tale. After getting a degree in education studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, he went on to do a PhD at Liverpool John Moores University, before becoming a professor of sociology at Glasgow in 2021, then a sociology professor at Cambridge in 2023. At the age of 37, he was the youngest black person ever to be given a Cambridge chair.

Baron Cohen, who’s apparently been developing this character as a long-term sleeper project, must have been cock-a-hoop. But could he push the joke even further? Doubts about Arday’s academic integrity began to surface in 2023 when two sociology professors started asking awkward questions about his doctoral thesis and some of his journal papers. Not so fast, thought Baron Cohen, who must have anticipated that his hastily-cobbled together ‘thesis’, masquerading as original research, would one day be rumbled – the title of Arday’s PhD even includes a rogue apostrophe.

To deflect these allegations, the comedian appears to have come up with the genius idea of enlisting his cousin, Sir Simon Baron Cohen, as a co-conspirator. In 2025, the director of Cambridge’s autism research centre co-authored an open letter furiously accusing Arday’s detractors of being racists. This was the academic equivalent of Ali G’s famous catchphrase whenever anyone challenged him: ‘Is it because I is black?’

Worth reading in full.