As is so often the case when the news cycle gets hold of someone accused of doing something wrong and keeps revealing more alleged wrong things until they are thoroughly humiliated, I am beginning to feel a bit sorry for Professor Jason Arday of Cambridge University.

He is in the news because it was alleged that portions of his 2015 PhD thesis were plagiarised. No, wait, sorry. Loads of partially plagiarised PhD theses are signed off in the UK every year without anyone giving a hoot. Arday is in the news because he subsequently became Cambridge University’s youngest black professor, writes about racial inequality in education and is thus a poster boy for diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI), and is alleged to have plagiarised parts of his thesis (although one university has cleared him).

Now, I’m not saying it’s because he is black that he is being scrutinised. Although being a poster boy for DEI does bring you under the scrutiny of all those who vehemently oppose DEI, from President Trump down to Tommy Robinson’s pot-bellied foot soldiers.

And the allegations of plagiarism about Arday were indeed first made by the notorious eugenicist (he prefers “race realist”) Nathan Cofnas. But he has certainly been scrutinised because he is famous. Ish.

You have to remember Sayre’s law here, which states that “academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low”. In general, you see, nobody in the real world cares if some conehead from the Fens copies someone else’s homework.

But if that conehead is young and black and outspoken, wears his hair in dreadlocks and gets photographed smiling broadly as if he is happy with his lot, then that makes a lot of other coneheads jealous (not just the racist ones). And if he has copied so much as a comma from someone else’s essay, well, it’s going to come out.

But now it has been suggested he is a bit of a fibber in other areas too. He has claimed, for example, to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days — genuine record territory and a complete surprise to the athletics world — and raised millions of pounds in doing so, though exact amounts change with each telling.

There have even been claims around prodigious sporting accomplishments in snooker and football, which nudge all this into genuine playground territory. It reminds me of my prep school friend Alex Goulden, who told me his father, Roger, a local dentist, had been on the first moon landing, offering as evidence the fact that he drove a Porsche. A story I believed for many years. Until I realised that all dentists drive Porsches.

None of us is as cool or as interesting as we would like to be 

This comes in addition to the already known “facts” of Arday’s biography: that he was non-verbal (because of autism) until he was 11 and unable to read or write until he was 18. He is a man with a “story”, you see. And as the story becomes more complex, it gets harder and harder to judge where the truth ends and the bullshit begins.

Which brings me to Angela Rayner. For this new Arday stuff emerged on a day when she was being grilled about her career as a carer by Evan Davis on Radio 4’s PM: how long did she actually do it for? Is that true? Why has she previously said it was longer than that? It’s relevant because she is another one with a “story”. Not of autism and marathons, but poverty and clubbing and teenage pregnancy. These, along with her years as a carer, are what are supposed to make her electable.

Makes me think of Rachel Reeves.

You know, the one who wasn’t British under-14 girl’s chess champion, and wasn’t at the Bank of England for a decade, and wasn’t an economist at HBOS, although she claimed all of these things in her path to becoming “Britain’s first woman chancellor” weep, weep, sob, sob, me, me, me.

She is a plagiarist too, funnily enough, admitting in 2023 she “should have done better” when the FT found more than 20 sentences and paragraphs lifted from other sources (including Wikipedia, duh) in her book The Women Who Made Modern Economics.

So, childhood sob stories, bogus CVs, plagiarism ... they all go together with these radical firebrands who live or die by their “story”, their carefully constructed otherness from the conservative mainstream (looking at you, Zack Polanski). They’re not home counties, Eton, Oxbridge, City white men like those bastards who got us into this mess. They are ... whatever they say they are.

But it’s not just left-wing politicians and academics at it. The Trump-endorsing wrestler Hulk Hogan used to claim that Elvis Presley came to his early matches in Memphis, until it was revealed that his first bout wasn’t until 1979, two years after Elvis’s death. Liz Truss was hammered for faking an impoverished childhood during her Tory leadership campaign. And the American comedian Steve Rannazzisi was forced to admit in 2015 that his entire backstory about escaping the World Trade Center on 9/11 was a fabrication.

We all tell fibs to get going in our careers. I got my first job in journalism as an editorial assistant at the Daily Telegraph on £11k-a-year in 1994 because I told them I could type 80 words a minute. And I got girls in the typing pool to do my copy inputting for me in return for a drink or a box of chocolates, until I’d got far enough up the ladder for my crap typing not to matter. But if The Times wanted to fire me now for misrepresentation, it would be a fair cop.

Going further back, I didn’t have any of the interests or experience I wrote on my Ucas form in 1986, or anything like the GCSEs I claimed.

I never had trials for Middlesex, or read Proust in French in a single summer, or worked as an interpreter in Berlin when the Wall was falling, or went to Live Aid and stood in the front, all of which lies I have at some point spun to my advantage. And I certainly didn’t get the top first in my year at Oxford, which I hear people claim for me from time to time, even now, 35 years later. Which means I must have said it once, years ago.

For some reason.

Because none of us is as employable or as cool or as interesting as we’d like to be. Deep down, we all worry that we are boring, inconsequential, essentially a bit shit. So until we have publicly proved otherwise, we have to make up the good stuff. And most of us, because we never amount to anything, are never caught out. It’s only the ones who parlay those whoppers all the way to the top that are left with a case to answer.