Evening all,

Sarah here. In today’s edition we bring you Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s gripping conversation with Prince Andrew's biographer Andrew Lownie, our weekly cultural hotlist, and an interview with a longstanding close friend of Professor Jason Arday.

Eleven days ago, Jason was found dead following an extraordinary international press storm triggered after a self-styled “race realist” academic (now suspended) claimed Professor Arday’s PhD thesis contained plagiarism. Jason had been cleared of those charges by Liverpool John Moores University last year.

There are many people and organisations that let Professor Arday down, including – and maybe especially – his employer, Cambridge University. But as journalists, we on the Nerve team have naturally spent a lot of time thinking about how the media seemed to lose all sense of perspective and proportion in how they reported the story.

While some stories were responsible and in the public interest, many were not. Social media posts became “news”, and much of the commentary was abjectly cruel and dehumanising. The most striking thing, as the dust settles and we get a chance to reflect, is how some speculation over what may or may not have been true evolved into “fact”. Thus allegations that were never (and still have not been) proved – that Jason didn’t run 30 marathons in 35 days as claimed, that he had plagiarised, that he wasn’t non-verbal as a child – somehow became accepted as real. In this digital age of misinformation, this is a case study in how truth can become malleable or vaporous.

What also became lost in the melee was that Jason was autistic, and vulnerable. 

Who was the real Jason Arday? The people we heard from in the media preceding Jason’s death were almost entirely not people who knew him. And now that much of the media has scuttled away from the story in shame, we are still not hearing from those who did. 

That’s why, last Friday, we published tributes from former students of Professor Arday. And it’s why today we are publishing a moving and fascinating interview with his friend Sam Clark. Sam and his brother played football with Jason in their team, BPR (Battersea Park Rangers), and his brother was in the same class as Jason at Heathbrook primary school in south London, where Sam’s mother, a teacher, sometimes gave Jason one-on-one assistance with reading.

Here we have, finally, an in-depth account of the real Jason Arday. And it’s so clear that he was an extraordinary and loving human being who has a hugely positive effect on many people’s lives. Our huge thanks to Sam for sharing his memories with our co-founder Carole Cadwalladr, who has also written about the Arday coverage on her Substack. You can watch the filmed interview here on YouTube or read it here (skip the intro, which is a repeat of what’s written here!).

The links to our Andrew Lownie interview and weekly hotlist are below. Please do consider upgrading to paid membership if you read the Nerve for free.

We asked Lucia to sum up her interview with Andrew Lownie, the illustrious royal biographer and author of a jaw-dropping book about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson. Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York includes in its recently published paperback edition an additional chapter on the former prince’s ultimate fall from grace: his arrest by Thames Valley police on the morning of his 66th birthday. To give you a taste of what you’ll find in our piece, Lucia says: “Lownie may be one of the few people who knows that the former prince has a recent habit of staying in his pyjamas until midday – so when he saw photos of Mountbatten-Windsor in a full suit first thing in the morning when police knocked at his door, he knew that the royal was probably tipped off about his arrest.” Read the full interview here.

“Full of nerdy intrigue, bumbling charm and whimsical wit,” the BBC’s quirky crime hit Ludwig, starring David Mitchell as socially inept puzzle-setter and accidental detective John “Ludwig” Taylor, has returned for a second series – and happily, says writer Michael Hogan, it’s a “corduroy-clad treat”. Or, if you fancy something less gentle, our film critic Ellen E Jones recommends you jump aboard the riotous, high-camp ride that is Stop! That! Train!, “a gag-packed disaster movie parody about a runaway train” from the creators of RuPaul’s Drag Race. For these hot tips and more in music, theatre, comedy and beyond, check out this week’s hotlist here.

Thanks for reading. We’ll back again on Friday with our weekend edition.

Sarah