Does anyone remember Nick Adderley? He was a chief constable who proudly wore medals for his naval service in the Falklands War. He was 15 at the time of the Falklands War.

The story of his fabricated military service was covered briefly by most news outlets (back in 2024) but then quickly stopped. I suspect most of us have essentially forgotten his name.

When the academic Jason Arday was caught lying, though – caught by a noted white supremacist, incidentally – he was pilloried on the front pages for weeks on end. I gave a sermon last week condemning the witch-hunt against him; I stopped short of saying, “This is so obviously going to result in him taking his own life,” but, of course, it did. He committed suicide yesterday afternoon.

The comparison with the gallant 15-year-old defender of the Falkland Islands is instructive.

A liar and fantasist running a police force (alive); a liar and fantasist with a Cambridge professorship (deceased). What characteristic might explain the differing levels of media outrage against the two, I wonder?

Well, Adderley is white and Jason Arday was black.

The ‘journalists’ who gave Adderley a free pass for his falsehoods while relentlessly hounding Jason Arday for his plagiarism were plainly motivated by race. If their motivation was simply to promote honesty in public life then they’d have done so consistently and with equal intensity.

In fact, though, they went after Jason Arday because they were furious that he occupied a post they felt should be held by someone white.

Black people in public life (and also women, those who are LGBTQ+, etc etc) are singled out for a wholly disproportionate level of scrutiny and an unacceptable level of harassment.

Everyone who sneered “DEI hire” when the story first broke, everyone who heard about the suicide and muttered that “he brought it on himself” (no doubt while insisting that post-mortem critiques of Anne Widdecombe’s political record were tasteless), everyone who denies that the press owes a duty of care to those about whom it writes: these groups are all part of the problem, all participants in the lynch mob.

This morning, Jewish communities read from Parashat Shoftim in the Book of Deuteronomy, which details a ritual that was held in the event of an unexplained death in ancient Israel. It was very weird, and involved breaking a calf’s neck.

Maimonides wrote that the weirdness was the entire point: by carrying out such a bizarre public spectacle, the community would draw attention to the tragedy, get talking, figure out what went wrong, and, ideally, take steps to prevent future deaths.

These days we don’t need to break a calf’s neck, because our society has inquests: a structured conversation around the factors that contribute to fatalities, and a formal means to recommend action to avoid recurrence.

We can only hope that Jason Arday’s inquest will call the media and the proudly ‘anti-woke’ bullies to account for their deliberate racialised hounding.

The life of a vulnerable individual has been pointlessly lost. May some positive moment of reckoning and realisation come out of it. May Jason Arday’s memory be for a blessing.

(Written somewhat in a rush and somewhat emotionally so without my usual footnoting.)