An X user going by the name “Smirkley” created a brilliant rundown of the Jason Arday affair that has to be seen to be believed. In fact, even if you read it, it still feels unbelievable.

In fact, it feels so unbelievable that we took the liberty of providing sources for every claim of Smirkley, and surprise, surprise, they all check out.

Check it out:

>be Jason Arday (The Guardian)
>claim diagnosed autistic at 3 (The Guardian)
>claim non-verbal until 11 (The Guardian)
>claim partial deafness in one ear & being taught to sign by yourself (The Guardian)
>claim couldn’t read until 18, still leave school w/ two GCSEs (The Guardian)
>claim you joined the pro snooker tour at 10, a year before you could speak (Spectator)
>claim you won so much at snooker your mom thought you were dealing drugs (Spectator)
>have the sport’s database show just one amateur event, many years later, w/ zero prize money (Spectator)
>claim football academy & a pro career (The Guardian)
>have Crystal Palace say no record (The Guardian)
>have the real record show tier eight (The Guardian)
>claim to have been on Seven Up, a series that first tracked 7 year olds as they grew up (The Telegraph)
>have it first air 28 years before you were actually seven years-old (The Telegraph)
>have BBC say you weren’t on it, since you’re not a time traveller (The Telegraph)
>claim youths at a bus stop beat you into a weeks-long coma (The Atlantic)
>claim you heard medics tell your parents to switch off life support (The Atlantic)
>claim you begged the judge to spare them (The Atlantic)
>claim they turned up years later as your students, hug them, become godfather to one’s child (The Atlantic)
>claim 30 marathons in 35 days in 2010, the last nine on a broken leg swollen to twice its size (The Telegraph)
>add an epileptic fit in later tellings (The Telegraph)
>tell local paper you raised more than £100,000 since you were 17 (The Telegraph)
>claim running 600 miles in six days as your final challenge, when the men’s record is 650 (The Telegraph)
>claim it came at the same time as a stroke (The Telegraph)
>have no race time on record anywhere, because why bother (The Telegraph)
>have nobody in the ultra world ever hear of you (The Telegraph)
>hand in a PhD on reflective practice w/ 100+ passages matching another student’s 2009 thesis (Cofnas Substack)
>have 188 sentences come back identical or near identical, including her copy-editing errors (Cofnas Substack)
>match a second PhD & two published papers on top (Cofnas Substack)
>claim you did it in 2.5 years, working full time, w/ a brain tumor (The Atlantic)
>claim the tumor was cut out 2 weeks before the viva (The Atlantic)
>claim a stroke after the surgery (The Atlantic)
>claim you turned up & remembered nothing at all (The Atlantic)
>claim one supervision meeting in the whole doctorate (Cofnas Substack)
>get the PhD anyway (LJMU thesis)
>publish a paper claiming focus groups w/ 32 black & minority students (The Times)
>have the quotes match an epidemiologist’s quotes (The Times)
>have structure follow his too (The Times)
>lift quotes into other papers & pass them off as interviews you conducted (The Times)
>get a correction, not a retraction b/c well. . . . (The Times)
>delete 18 of the 31 quotes (The Times)
>get full chair at Glasgow (BBC)
>tell TEDx crowd you’ve raised over £5m by age 36 (Spectator)
>claim you were once watched a teacher tell a boy who wanted to be a concert pianist to aim lower (The Atlantic)
>retell sort in 2021 w/ the boy as a would-be astrophysicist (The Atlantic)
>retell it again in 2023 as your own & experience & open a Ch 4 film w/ it (The Atlantic)
>be youngest black prof in 900 years, and at Cambridge (The Guardian)
>get BBC radio series on loneliness (BBC)
>claim 70% of Brits live below the breadline (Spectator)
>be voted number 1 in the Disability Power 100 (Able Magazine / Shaw Trust)
>collect honorary degrees from Solent, Anglia Ruskin, St Mary’s, Westminster & London South Bank (The Guardian)
>say you raised millions for 70+ charities (Spectator)
>claim a Palgrave book called Being Young, Black, and Male (Spectator)
>have Palgrave say it was never published (Spectator)
>claim water points built for WaterAid across SA & Africa (Spectator)
>have WaterAid webpage titled “Why we don’t send volunteers abroad” (Spectator)
>list yourself as a visiting prof at Glasgow (The Times)
>have Glasgow say “nope” (The Times)
>list yourself as a visiting pro at Ohio State’s Office of DEI (National Review)
>have no record and have that office turn out to have shut in 2025 (National Review)
>have Birkbeck say no record of your master’s (Spectator)
>have Nelson Mandela U say the adjunct post ended (Spectator)
>get a second paper corrected 2024 (The Times)
>tell a funeral directors’ convention in New Orleans the ultras raised £5m alone, but no record again (Spectator)
>be named on more than $10m in UKRI & NIHR grants (The Guardian)
>write to a minister claiming knife threats, assault, spitting, rape, & death threats, plus bananas, bullets, corrosive substances, & mutilated animals (The Telegraph)
>photograph none of it for some odd reason! (The Telegraph)
>claim a masked man w/ a knife cornered you in the faculty twice (The Telegraph)
>show up on no CCTV either time (The Telegraph)
>tell nobody AT THE TIME (The Telegraph)
>claim u learn to read when your future wife shows you phonics at a sports shop (The Atlantic)
>have 332 stray apostrophes in your thesis (Cofnas Substack)
>hear your faculty head tell the BBC you’re the best in the world, but the best at what? (The Atlantic)
>water your old “hate mail” claim down to just harassment once lawyers get involved w/ allegation (The Times)
>soften tumor from cognitive harm to maybe-visual between proofs (The Atlantic)
>date the beating claim to 18 , make it 4 teens now, & then exchange the coma for seizures (The Atlantic)
>turn “remembered nothing” into a wiped memory & a thesis relearned from scratch (The Atlantic)
>say your parents were told to put you in a home, & they refused to do so (The Atlantic)
>claim in book pitch that you also had testicular cancer, but later turn that to 2 brain tumors (The Atlantic)
>say in book pitch you were in a bad car crash & had a 3-month coma, then drop it from book (The Atlantic)
>shift the suicide attempt’s timing & the attackers’ ages between pitch & the book (The Atlantic)
>claim police traced a severed pig’s head at your parents’ house to a butcher who’d sold a “whole hog” that morning (The Telegraph)
>have the butcher say no officer ever came in (The Telegraph)
>have the Met call the whole tale “categorically incorrect” (The Telegraph)
>say you’re experiencing a modern day lynching on a podcast (The Times)
>have the ASA make your speaking agency strip unbacked claims (Spectator)
>hire Carter-Ruck & get Times Higher Education to kill a finished story (Retraction Watch)
>report their journalist to Scotland Yard for emailing you questions about your record (Retraction Watch)
>have officers tell him to stop, your mental health was hurt (Retraction Watch)
>report a retired professor too, have Devon & Cornwall decline to bother (Retraction Watch)
>have the Met chief later admit “we dropped the ball on that one” (Retraction Watch)
>get cleared by a panel you asked to weigh the “war on critical race theory” (Cofnas Substack)
>have 188 matching sentences called an honest & reasonable error (Cofnas Substack)
>do keynote on the playbook conservatives use to hunt black academics b/c beyond reproach (The Times)
>have the Times find participant 11 in study is three different people (The Times)
>have the same quotes come out of different mouths 25 times across three papers (The Times)
>have the sexes in your paper add up to 110% (The Times)
>have false funding declarations (The Times)
>have an outside expert say there is no question the plagiarism is extensive (The Times)
>have a Cambridge autism professor send round “URGENT PLEASE SIGN ANTI RACISM LETTER” (The Guardian)
>get 13,000 names & three Cambridge heads vouching for text they never read (The Guardian)
>have Cambridge call it a “vile smear campaign” (The Guardian)
>blame autistic mimicry, a l supervisor who left, & one you never met (The Times)
>call the campaign racially motivated (The Times)
>say “what I am not is a liar” (The Times)
>turn 600 miles of margarine in six days into twelve (The Telegraph)
>have Anglia Ruskin edit your citation page the day the Cofnas piece dropped (Cofnas Substack)
>get Solent to delete the running claims (Spectator)
>have the TEDx video go private (Spectator)
>have your Jesus College page quietly turn Professorial Fellow into l Fellow & a Liverpool master’s vanish (The Guardian)
>have academics call for a regulator probe, have the Office for Students decline to comment (The Guardian)
>have Cambridge open a probe into your qualifications & honorary appointments (The Guardian)
>have Jesus College open its own (The Guardian)
>quit both on the spot (Good Law Project)
>put the letter out through the Good Law Project (Good Law Project)
>have the letter promise you’ll return stronger & wiser (Good Law Project)
>have the letter come back 100% AI (The Atlantic)
>have Jesus College drop its probe the moment you quit (The Guardian)
>have the Good Law Project boss keep defending you, chalking it all up to neurodivergence (Good Law Project)
>have the ghostwritten memoir come out in the US anyway, after a 1.4m pre-empt (The Atlantic)
>have the UK edition still set for Aug 27 (The Atlantic)
>have Cambridge order an outside audit of how you were ever hired (The Guardian)
>have Durham & Glasgow open probes of their own (The Guardian)
>commit suicide (The Guardian)
>have people portray you as a victim? (The Guardian)

Did we make any mistakes? Let us know in the comments if we did. And be sure to give Mr. Smirkley a follow.