I lament Jason Arday’s apparent suicide. I shake my head at the dreadful pity of it. Yes, he had been serially dishonest. And yes, the immediate responsibility lay with him: the hand that killed him was his own. Yet his death was still a tragedy. He’d become so trapped in a fantasy about himself, it seems, that when reality finally broke in, Nemesis came with it. A terrible reckoning caused the self he’d invented to disintegrate. It must have seemed to him that black nothing remained.

But Jason’s responsibility is widely shared. It also belongs to all the adults who indulged him. Who failed to make him reckon with the truth. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of racist bad faith. Who, year after year, aided and abetted the elaboration of his fantastic claims. Who patronised him.

Why did they do it? For many, no doubt, because uncaring kindness was so much easier than telling the truth. For some, evidently, because their own academic standards were hardly higher than his. For others, because he was a useful poster boy for their ‘decolonising’ crusade.

But is it credible that not one of the seasoned teachers or academics who vetted him in the course of his career failed to see what is now so glaringly obvious – that the emperor was stark naked? I think not. I’d wager a modest fortune that some did see it, but knowing what it would cost them to say so, suppressed the thought and bit their tongues. Why? Lest they be accused of racism, their friends step away, and their careers suffer.

There’s a warning in this sorry tale for the leadership of the Church of England. The Church commissioners, including both archbishops, persist in their support for ‘Project Spire’, the policy of devoting £100million to paying reparations for the church’s alleged profiting from transatlantic slavery. Reliable sources tell me that the project has been vigorously championed among the commissioners who are responsible for managing the church’s assets, including the First Church Estates commissioner, Alan Smith. They also observe that the decision to proceed with the project was made in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 and the consequent anti-racist, knee-bending panic. Apparently, only one of the commissioners’ 27 board members voiced an objection to it. Was that because all the others were convinced supporters? I know for a fact they weren’t. So why didn’t more doubters speak up? Could it have been – as an eye-witness reports – that dissent was suppressed, because senior church figures are concerned about being branded racist?

Read it all at Spiked