The carrion-eaters - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge

Numb at the Lodge

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The carrion-eaters<br>What we did to Jason Arday

Sam Kriss<br>Aug 17, 2026

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It’ll probably never happen to you. Maybe I should pretend it will: try to grab you by the self-interest and say, look, consider that this weapon you’re playing around with might one day be pointed at you—but it won’t. You will never be Ardayed. You will never have to sit helplessly while your entire life is systematically disassembled in front of you. You will never be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. There will never be huge crowds delightedly rummaging around in your entrails, the chirp and titter of a million sparrows pecking at the flesh of a dead elephant: you’re safe from all that. Not because you’re innocent. You’re every bit as guilty as he is. Nobody makes it through life without swaddling themselves in a thick coating of lies. You lie about yourself so often and so automatically that you almost start to believe it. The only difference is that when Jason Arday lied he went big. Huge, rough-hewn, monumental fictions, like ‘I couldn’t read or write until I was 18’ and ‘I ran nine marathons with a broken leg’ and ‘I had a brain tumour removed two weeks before my viva and had to relearn everything I’d written in my dissertation’ and ‘a mysterious South American shaman woman prophesied that I was destined for great deeds.’ You don’t lie like that. All your delusions are tiny, minuscule things. ‘I’m a good person.’ ‘I am satisfactory in bed.’ ‘The people who dislike me are just jealous.’ It takes a greatness of soul to build fabulations the way Jason Arday did. You need a Promethean spirit to decide to create yourself again out of nothing, and real courage to bet your entire being on lies that can so easily be disproven. But you are small and cowardly and you will spend all your life scurrying around in the undergrowth of the world, never poking out your head to look at the sky, and the thing that happened to Professor Jason Arday will never, ever happen to you.<br>Of course, everything the carrion-eaters said about Arday was true. Since his death, some of the people who think they’re on his side have tried to rewrite history. He was really just an ordinary academic, hounded to death by the right-wing media, because they couldn’t accept that a black man might deserve a professorship at Cambridge. Or, in the more condescending version, he was the hapless victim of all the smug white liberals, who kept promoting him way above his abilities to burnish their diversity quotas. No: this is an insult. He was brilliant at what he did. He blagged his way through the world with nothing but brio and good looks. One of the great British chancers, a wide boy from a council estate who managed to insinuate himself into one of the most prestigious universities in the world. He conned them all; all it took was some South London street smarts and he had them eating right out of his hand. He could ramble about Australian soap operas and convince everyone they were listening to a genius. They were! But now, in death, you want to shrink him down again. Domesticate him, turn him into another passive victim, distinguished by nothing more than the colour of his skin.<br>It’s also completely true that the press had every right to report on this. It’s news. Cambridge is a major institution, it takes government grants, it represents the country; of course we have a right to know if it’s giving out professorships to lovable rogues with a totally invented backstory. Arday was advising the government on the school curriculum; people in that kind of position need to be held to public scrutiny. But is that really all you were doing? Admit it: you were having fun. Everyone was enjoying it. Peer into the man’s house, infrared cameras, concrete-penetrating LIDAR, let’s see what’s in his sock drawer: socks. I knew it. Every day there was another piece of insane and compelling Arday news. He’d claimed he was on a TV show that aired decades before he was born. He’d claimed he was threatened in his office by a masked knifeman who was mysteriously invisible to CCTV. There’s a big interview in the Times. There’s new revelations in the Guardian. His autobiography’s about to come out, big celebratory moment, major publisher, pinnacle of his career, champagne at the book launch, but look, looklooklook the Atlantic has an advance copy and they just ripped it to shreds, and isn’t it fun? There’s a guy on TikTok who says he went to school with him and all that stuff about him being nonverbal until the age of eleven is fake. ‘The bredda was chatting, yeah? The bredda was chatting.’ We’ve built this reverse panopticon where the gaze of a hundred million people converges on a single point, and it turns out all those concentrated eyeballs have the force of a ten-kilowatt laser, they start stripping off the skin, they peel a man like an orange. Put anyone you like in...