Wildlife Tweets 🌿🍄

Never forget that a few weeks ago half this fucking ecosystem was holding a state funeral for Rod Liddle. Suddenly every professional shit-stirrer in Britain was Cicero. - He was a great satirist. - He was a fearless polemicist. - He was Jonathan fucking Swift with a fag hanging out of his mouth. All the murkier bits were quietly folded underneath the tablecloth. The sexism, the misogyny, the domestic violence, the endless misanthropic trolling, the whole career spent behaving as though civilisation would collapse unless somebody periodically wrote something revolting in The Spectator and called it courage. But Jason Arday? Apparently his great unforgivable crime was that he may have been a bit of a fucking blagger. He told tall stories. He embellished things. He convinced prestigious people that he was more extraordinary than he actually was. He may have blagged his way into rooms full of clever white people who then enthusiastically told everybody how wonderful he was. STOP THE FUCKING PRESS. A charismatic man exaggerated his achievements and important institutions swallowed it whole. We have apparently discovered fraud. And Christ, look at the difference in cultural treatment. A white male provocateur like Liddle can spend decades being obnoxious, offensive, self-mythologising and professionally irritating and it gets repackaged as roguishness. We celebrate him as a maverick. A rogue, A dangerous wit. Bit of a bastard, but what a writer. A Black academic allegedly embellishes marathon times and elements of his biography and suddenly Britain develops the investigative appetite of fucking Woodward and Bernstein. Every claim checked. Every former student interviewed. Every old job excavated. Every anecdote cross-examined. Every institution dragged into the dock. And hovering over all of it is that poisonous little insinuation: DEI. How did this man get there? Who lowered the standards? Which deserving person was displaced? Funny, because British academia has never exactly suffered a shortage of white plagiarists, cranks, bullshitting grandees, hereditary mediocrities, eugenicists, financial scandals and people whose professional altitude substantially exceeded their intellectual horsepower. Where was this incandescent concern for institutional standards then? Where were the fucking torches? Where was the tedious national inquiry into how some spectacularly mediocre white bloke had acquired a chair, three honorary fellowships and the confidence to explain civilisation to everybody else? Apparently the system only became an existential emergency when a Black man may have blagged it. I have spent years telling people the scar under my eye came from fighting a grizzly bear with a penknife. It actually came from playing rugby when I was ten. Nobody appointed me Professor of Ursine Combat because of it, admittedly, but the principle stands. Sometimes people bullshit. Sometimes institutions are stupid enough to believe them. The Arday story deserved scrutiny. What it did not deserve was this extraordinary racial pantomime in which one possibly fraudulent Black professor became evidence that the entire project of allowing Black people into prestigious institutions had somehow gone horribly wrong. Because if bullshitters occupying positions above their station discredits the system that elevated them, Britain is going to have to close Parliament, half the newspapers and several fucking universities by lunchtime on Monday.