The Creation of X Factor, was the beginning of the end for British excellence. The Tragic end result after 30 years was the suicide of a young father.
Everyone wants to point the finger at someone else today following the tragic death of Jason Arday, with blame flying around at the press, social media, the political right, racists, universities... James O'Brien
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Personally, I blame Simon Cowell.
I have blamed The X Factor for most things wrong with the modern world for years, admittedly alongside Fabian Tony Blair, social media and those taps in public toilets which require a small act of digital foreplay before they will dispense three seconds of lukewarm water.
There was something genuinely fascinating about the early audition programmes because every series somebody would shuffle into a room absolutely convinced they were the next Whitney Houston, take a heroic breath, open their mouth and produce a noise like somebody reversing a Vauxhall Corsa over a goose. Simon Cowell would perform that peculiar rearrangement of his face which told you something terrible was about to happen, Louis Walsh would Biccus Diccus style giggle, and eventually somebody would ask the obvious question:
has nobody ever told you that you cannot sing?
Almost invariably, nobody had. Not only had nobody told them they couldn't sing - they had told them they could.
https://youtu.be/O0iXHukr_Y4?si=3zhZiOFWMVffhZbt
Everybody around them had felt that kindness meant maintaining the fantasy rather than telling somebody, lovingly and privately, that they sounded like a fox being murdered in a wheelie bin.
Having protected their feelings for twenty years they cheerfully waved them towards Simon Cowell, several thousand people and half the country on a Saturday night to be publicly humiliated.
I always found those auditions more interesting than the good singers because they exposed something rather profound about the difference between kindness and cowardice. Nobody wanted to be the arsehole who caused five minutes of disappointment in the kitchen, so eventually millions of strangers did it for them - at which point the same family who had spent years insisting little Chardonnay had the "voice of an angel" were standing backstage looking furious with Simon Cowell for noticing that she plainly did not. That, I think, was the beginning of the end of meritocracy.
Then the sob story became part of the qualification
The X Factor itself gradually changed, because after a while we stopped merely protecting people from discovering they were not particularly good at something and started rewarding people for reasons which had increasingly little to do with whether they were the best person in the competition.
Every contestant acquired a backstory, accompanied by the obligatory plinky plonky piano music, black and white childhood photographs and a solemn voice explaining that Nan had died, Dad had left, the family dog had alopecia and singing Angels by Robbie Williams had been the only thing which got them through cancer.
By the time they actually opened their mouth it almost seemed vulgar to ask whether they could sing, because we had already established that they were brave, lovely, deserving and had been on a journey.
Soon the same thing was everywhere, from Britain's Got No Talent and Aresholes on Ice to endless celebrity competitions where being famous for being infamous, became a life acheivement.
It seems trivial because it happened on Saturday night television, but I increasingly think it represented an enormous cultural shift, because somewhere during those years we stopped asking, 'Who is best at this?' and started asking, 'Whose success would make us feel nicest about ourselves?' Those are not the same question.
It does not matter terribly much when selecting somebody to release a Christmas single everybody will have forgotten by February, but it matters enormously when the same philosophy escapes the television studio and finds its way into universities, journalism, comedy, broadcasting, politics, business and public institutions.
A surgeon does not become better because her childhood was difficult, an engineer does not make a bridge remain standing because he is black and his grandad came over on the Windrush, and a professor at Cambridge cannot become a brilliant academic merely because his personal journey is "inspirational".
None of that means adversity, representation or widening opportunity are bad things, because the entire point of equality should have been removing stupid barriers so talented people who had previously been excluded could compete properly. Instead, somewhere along the way, we began treating the story itself as part of the qualification, rather than working out if somebody was actually qualified.
Rosie Jones - "Comedian"
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Rosie Jones is an obvious example, and merely mentioning her demonstrates the problem because people immediately become terrified that criticism of a comedian who has cerebral palsy must somehow be criticism of cerebral palsy itself.
I do not think Rosie Jones is funny, which ought to be the most mundane opinion imaginable because there are hundreds of able bodied comedians I do not find funny either, and nobody assumes this means I harbour a pathological hatred of functioning legs.
Jones has received genuinely vile disability related abuse and threats, which should be condemned unequivocally, but somebody threatening her because she is disabled and somebody watching her comedy without laughing are two completely different things.
Comedy has a particularly brutal quality control mechanism because however important a programme may be considered by commissioners, eventually an audience has to laugh. Not "admire your bravery", not "approve of your representation" and not "appreciate how meaningful your platform is", but laugh.
If television commissioners genuinely believe Rosie Jones is one of Britain's funniest comedians, that's one thing - but if even some of her extraordinary prominence comes from people privately thinking she is not especially funny while being frightened that rejecting a disabled comedian would make them look ableist, then they are not protecting Rosie Jones at all, they are protecting themselves.
They get to congratulate themselves on "representation" and go home feeling progressive.
Rachel Reeves is another example
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Rachel Reeves became Britain's first female Chancellor in 2024. She was also presented very heavily as the serious economist, the grown up who understood the numbers and would restore economic credibility.
A BBC investigation subsequently found that her online CV had overstated the length of her employment at the Bank of England, while questions had already been raised about how her later HBOS career had been described, with her role there having been in retail banking and customer relations rather than simply the impression of another economist posting.
The point is that, Britain's first female Chancellor, serious economist, Bank of England experience, sensible woman arriving with a calculator to repair the finances after all those silly men had made a mess was a fraud and couldn't do the job.
She may as well have just put "has vagina" on her CV, beacuse that's basically the only reason she got given the job.
Exactly the same applies to race, disability, sexuality or anything else. Once people suspect that the qualification has been adulterated by the story, you damage the people who genuinely achieved the standard.
James O’Brien deserves a mention here too, because this is now the second time he has been taken in by a fantasist’s extraordinary story.
During the Carl Beech scandal he gave airtime and credibility to the supposed Westminster VIP abuse claims which eventually collapsed spectacularly, with Beech jailed for 18 years for perverting the course of justice, fraud and child sex offences.
This time O’Brien admitted Arday had made him feel “like a mug”, although even then he could not resist explaining that he had never thought to doubt Arday’s extraordinary rise because, as he put it, he was “not a racist”. He also said Arday had apparently regarded him as somebody he might persuade to “stick up for him”, by which point O’Brien was having none of it and, in effect, told him to hop it.
Given what has happened since, I rather wonder how O’Brien is feeling today, because twice now his determination to believe the morally satisfying story appears to have overridden the rather less glamorous business of wondering whether the story was true.
Which brings us to Jason Arday
Jason Arday now looks to me like the most tragic possible destination of this entire cultural journey.
We all know the story by now: He became Cambridge University's youngest ever Black professor, achieving enormous public prominence through an extraordinary life story in which he had reportedly been diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay, was unable to speak until eleven and unable to read or write until eighteen before eventually rising through academia. His Cambridge appointment was explicitly celebrated in terms of representation and what his success meant to underrepresented groups.
It was irresistible because it contained everything modern institutions adore: race, disability, educational disadvantage, adversity, triumph, representation and one of the greatest universities in the world glittering at the end.
It was The X Factor VT with a Cambridge professorship instead of a recording contract, and you can practically hear the plinky plonky piano.
Then people started looking more closely. Serious allegations emerged concerning Arday's PhD thesis and other academic work, including alleged unattributed overlap with earlier research, alongside questions about parts of his public biography and fundraising claims. Arday denied deliberate plagiarism and wrongdoing, previous university processes had not found academic misconduct, but the controversy ultimately became serious enough for Cambridge to launch an independent investigation into his appointment and tenure.
Arday resigned, saying that the relentless accusations and commentary had taken a profound toll on him and those he loved. Then, on 14 August 2026, (yesterday) Jason Arday was found unresponsive at a property in Battersea and pronounced dead at just 41, with police describing the death as "unexpected but not suspicious" - his family said the campaign of misinformation and harassment had become too much for him.
He leaves a wife and two children.
I took the piss out of Jason Arday myself, and I am not going to perform that slightly nauseating internet ritual where somebody dies and everyone hurriedly deletes what they said about him last Tuesday before announcing that they always thought he was wonderful. I did not.
But I do find his death desperately sad.
However, the question I cannot stop asking is exactly the same one Simon Cowell used to ask those awful singers twenty years ago:
did nobody around him tell him?
Not cruelly, not publicly and certainly not with racial abuse, but privately and because they cared about him? If there were claims which could not survive scrutiny, was there nobody close enough to say, 'Jason, mate, you cannot keep saying this because eventually somebody is going to check'?
If there were problems with academic work, why was the worst possible place for them to be discovered in newspapers and all over social media after he had become internationally famous?
If institutions had doubts, why had the inspirational story been allowed to become so enormous before those doubts were finally resolved?
Nobody can possibly know whether earlier intervention would have changed anything - What we can see is the appalling scale of the fall, from one of Britain's most celebrated inspirational academic stories to resignation, worldwide scrutiny and death in an incredibly short period.
Would this have happened if he were white?
Since Arday's death, race has inevitably moved to the centre of the argument, with supporters and some Black academics arguing that the intensity of the scrutiny reflected racism and a wider hostility towards Black scholars.
But I keep seeing versions of the claim that "this would never have happened to a white man", and I think there is another possibility which nobody seems terribly keen to discuss: it would never have got this far with a white man.
Would an ordinary, boring white academic making extraordinary claims have encountered ordinary, boring scepticism much earlier because nobody in the room would have worried that checking those claims made them look racist?
I think Cambridge's own independent investigation into how Arday was appointed makes it a legitimate question about institutional judgement.
His race, disability and extraordinary biography were not introduced into his story by nasty people online - They were part of the way his success was celebrated, which means institutions themselves invested moral value in what his appointment represented.
The people doing the clapping rarely take the fall
This is the thread running through all of it, from the terrible singer to the comedian, broadcaster, politician and academic, because the person being protected is usually the person who eventually pays the bill.
There is something horribly selfish hidden inside all of this supposed kindness because saying yes feels lovely, while saying no feels horrible. Telling somebody they are wonderful makes us feel supportive, whereas telling them they are not good enough at something risks tears, anger and accusations that we are cruel, jealous or prejudiced, so we choose the answer which makes us feel like nice people and call that compassion.
Sometimes compassion is telling your partner that the dress is dreadful before she leaves the house, because you love her more than you love ten minutes of peace.
Sometimes compassion is telling your son he cannot sing before he goes on national television, because you would rather he be furious with you in the kitchen than humiliated by strangers.
Sometimes compassion is telling your friend that the story he is telling has become too big and somebody is going to check it, or telling a comedian that the material is not good enough, or telling a candidate that they are not ready for the job.
None of those things produces an inspirational LinkedIn post, but all of them might prevent something much worse later.
At some point somebody still has to be able to sing
Perhaps the great lesson of The X Factor was never that Simon Cowell was cruel, but that Simon Cowell was simply the first person in the contestant's life prepared to tell the truth, by which point the truth had become humiliating because everybody else had left it so bloody late.
We have subsequently constructed an entire culture around avoiding that moment, confusing criticism with hatred, scepticism with prejudice, standards with exclusion and rejection with cruelty, until 'being kind' increasingly means just cowardice.
Perhaps Cambridge will examine whether enthusiasm for an inspirational story interfered with ordinary scrutiny, perhaps broadcasters will remember that viewers are customers rather than recalcitrant pupils, perhaps commissioners will rediscover that representation and excellence are perfectly capable of existing together without pretending one can substitute for the other, and perhaps people generally will remember that someone willing to risk you being furious with them for ten minutes may be considerably kinder than somebody willing to applaud you all the way onto the stage.
I rather doubt any of that will happen. I suspect we will learn almost nothing from the tragedy of Jason Arday because learning the lesson would require far too many important people to admit that what they have spent thirty years sparing people the smallest private disappointment because they wanted to look good, whilst exposing them to the greatest public cruelty imaginable.
The plinky plonky piano will start again, another inspirational story will walk onto the stage, everybody will clap because clapping feels lovely, and somewhere in the room somebody who can see exactly what is coming will decide it would be terribly unkind to say anything.
