Jason Arday has resigned from his post at the University of Cambridge, but as the story rumbles on and new revelations about him emerge by the hour, The Spectator thought it would be useful to create a comprehensive reference guide of all the outlandish claims made by our modern-day Walter Mitty.

Arday claimed that he went to both South America and West Africa to install water points

Athletic prowess: Arday claimed that he once ran six hundred miles between Edinburgh and London in six days for charity, an accomplishment which would put him in the upper tier of world ultra marathon runners. He also claimed that he ran run thirty marathons in thirty-five days. On the twenty-first marathon he suffered from an epileptic fit and fractured his leg after falling down. This did not deter him and he went on to finish the remaining nine marathons.’ ‘To this day, I don’t really know how I did it,’ he recalled.

Pass the pâté: Arday claimed in a 2024 speaking engagement that he raised over £5 million for charity from his marathons and that he had raised over £5.5 million in his life. This is an extraordinary sum – Arday has said elsewhere that the money went ‘most notably’ to Shooting Star Children’s Hospices and Shelter. One JustGiving page shows Arday raising only £380 for one of his 300 miles in three days challenges.

Full to the brim: Arday claimed that he went to both South America and West Africa to install water points. WaterAid said that they never send their volunteers abroad, ‘out of respect for the people we work with, we don’t encourage or facilitate self-funded visits either’.

First they came for the professors of sociology: Arday has made several claims about physical threats. He claimed that masked men threatened him twice if he failed to resign, the second time at knifepoint. The CCTV in his building did not catch these intruders. He told the Guardian that a severed pig’s head was sent to his family home, and that the police had chased this up, finding that a butchers in South London had sold a whole pig the morning that the incident occurred. The police told the Guardian ‘categorically’ that no such investigation had taken place, and the butcher which Arday said the pig had come from also said that they had no recollection of selling the pig.

Back of the Net: Arday claimed in an interview at the University of Bath that he played academy-level football, and that he went on to play semi professionally. This claim has not been repeated in his to-be-published autobiography. He has not explained which club he was attached to.

That’s a bad miss: Arday was apparently something of a snooker shark. While at secondary school, he says that he would play in a local snooker hall, then afterwards came to win substantial sums in local competitions. He says in his memoir that he was making so much cash from his triumphs that his mother thought he could be a drug dealer. CueTracker, a comprehensive online database of professional snooker, shows him having participated in one amateur competition, winning no prize money.

A star is born: Arday claimed that he was in the BBC documentary Seven Up. Seven Up was a television series that followed the lives of ten boys and four girls in England. It began in 1964, more than twenty years before Arday was born in 1985. The BBC said that Arday had ‘nothing to do with our films’.

Baptism of fire: Arday claims that when he went to secondary school his teachers would strike his knuckles with a pen if he failed to complete his tasks. Corporal punishment was banned in England in 1987, around two years after Arday was born. Perhaps he skipped a few years due to his talent?

Act like you belong: Arday has claimed that he was a visiting professor for Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University, all of which have denied that he held such a position. According to the Daily Mail, Arday has also wrongly claimed to have a position as honorary professor at Durham University.

Oxfordian theory: He claimed that he had published a book called ‘Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse’ with Palgrave Macmillan. This claim can be seen in his speaker biography for a Queen’s University Belfast live speaking event. Palgrave Macmillan say that they took a proposal from Arday from this book but did not publish it. Arday did not give the Telegraph a comment on this story.

Cambridge University has said that Arday has been the victim of a ‘vile campaign to undermine his credibility’.

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