More than 31,000 people, including several MPs, have signed a petition urging U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham to hold a public inquiry into alleged media harassment of the late academic Jason Arday, the organisers said Sunday (August 16, 2026).
“There cannot be any doubt that Dr. Arday’s tragic death was the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” the Good Law Project wrote on its website. Arday risked his suicide”.
Other friends have said he was vulnerable, given Arday has written extensively about being diagnosed as autistic as a child, and not speaking until he was 11.
“A significant element in that harassment was the colour of his skin,” it said, adding “there cannot be any doubt that racism lay at the heart of this story”. The allegations against Arday, 41, had received widespread media coverage from the U.K. press after another academic — self-defined “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024 — said in July he found numerous instances of plagiarism in the professor’s work. In a letter published when he resigned on August 5, Arday said the move was “the only way” to end a “difficult period”, but should not be “mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me”. The Good Law Project said “many of the signatories” to its campaign had “warned multiple media outlets privately that their relentless pursuit of Dr.
The petition was launched by the Good Law Project activist group after Arday, who was appointed three years ago as the youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge University, was found dead on Friday.
