I don’t know if Simon & Schuster, the illustrious publishers, are really going to continue with their current plan to launch the memoirs of Jason Arday, who this week resigned in circumstances both hilarious and tragic from his position as a professor at Cambridge.

That was the position at least, last night, but it seems incredible. Apart from anything else, it would be cruel to Mr Arday.

The guy is – as he said when he resigned – only human. Those who claim to have his interests at heart should spare him further ridicule.

Yesterday, it emerged journalists from the Atlantic magazine had apparently uncovered his proposal to publishers for the book, in which he makes yet more bonkers claims: about the extraordinary diseases he has suffered and recovered from; the acts of heroism he has committed; the many global accolades he has received but for which, curiously, no evidence can be found.

Perhaps all this stuff is true. Maybe there will be further volumes, in which he explains how he secretly won a Victoria Cross while in the SAS, found a cure for cancer and was offered the throne of Patagonia.

At the heart of this story is a shameful piece of racism – not by the people who tried to expose the fantasies and plagiarism of Mr Arday, but by those who promoted him. Whatever the sins and deceptions of the young man from south London, they are completely eclipsed by the fundamental fraud of the academics who used and abused him for their own selfish ends.

Oh we all know what’s going to happen now, don’t we? All those responsible at the University of Cambridge will run for the hills, desperately trying to cover their arses as they go.

They will say they didn’t know, that they were fooled, that they were taken in by his charm. They will present him as a chancer, a charlatan, someone who brilliantly preyed on their good intentions.

At the heart of this story is a shameful piece of racism – not by the people who tried to expose the fantasies and plagiarism of Mr Arday but by those who promoted him, writes Boris Johnson

‘But we meant well!’ the Cambridge dons will say, wringing their hands. It is crucial that we don’t allow them to get away with this defence.

Let us suppose it’s true that at the time of his appointment as a Cambridge professor, in early 2023, the then-37-year-old Arday genuinely managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the Board of Electors. Let’s suppose that they somehow managed to remain oblivious to his plagiarism, his spelling mistakes and the many oddities in his background story.

How could his autism have been so bad, for instance, that he only learned to read and write at the age of 18, when it turns out he had secured two GCSEs two years earlier?

How did he manage to run 30 marathons in 35 days, despite sustaining a hairline fracture on day 21 that caused his leg to swell up to double its size? If he had really run 600 miles in six days – as he said – then why wasn’t he globally famous as a high-performance athlete?

And so on. Arday is obviously in some ways a warm-hearted and well-meaning fellow, but his life story is full of such obvious tripe that you would have thought the professors – with their inbuilt and seasoned bulls***-o-meters – would have detected it.

But let’s imagine that they fell for the whole thing, or even that they thought something was a bit rum, but turned a blind eye. In a way it doesn’t matter. Their real crime is far, far worse, and it is one that they cannot conceivably deny. At the time he was made a professor, Jason Arday had no real body of work to justify any such elevation.

He was responsible for no new discovery or piece of thought leadership. In fact, he had produced – in his astonishingly brief career – absolutely nothing of any notable academic interest or merit whatsoever.

And yet they decided to give him the highest scholarly accolade in our country: they made him a full professor at one of the greatest universities on earth, whose reputation for excellence is a crucial part of our global soft power.

Why did they do it?

The university was blatant and unashamed in explaining, in its Press release and in all the publicity that followed, that they were proud to have appointed ‘the youngest black professor in the history of the university’ – a superlative that they often repeated.

Jason Arday this week resigned from his position as a professor at Cambridge university, leaving his role at Jesus College

They gave him a ‘professorial chair in the sociology of education’; and the logic seemed to be that as a young black man who had experienced difficulties in becoming a university academic, he was going to become a leading expert in the discipline of how young black men have difficulties in becoming university academics.

It was surreal, a parody of how higher education is supposed to work, but Arday became a media star, a sensation. And the dons didn’t care.

They didn’t care about the students, paying through the nose to sit at the feet of a man with no real qualifications. They didn’t care about the taxpayers who so generously subsidised his salary.

They showed complete contempt for other academics who had worked hard and been turned down for such posts. Above all they were completely indifferent to the fate of poor Arday, who was only too likely – as they must have known – to be found out and humiliated.

They cared only about themselves and the virtue they could signal by saying they had at last got a young black professor at Cambridge.

It is a real scandal. These academics have done immense damage to their university and to the cause of higher education. In 1957 the US Supreme Court Judge Felix Frankfurter famously defined academic freedom, as ‘the right for a university to determine for itself, on academic grounds, who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught and who may be admitted for study’.

Cambridge university has openly and exultantly trashed that principle. They did not make this appointment on academic grounds and there is no way they can claim that they did.

They did it on political grounds. They did it on racial grounds – and they boasted about it. You remember the brilliant satire Trading Places, in which two elderly American financiers take a bet with one other (one dollar), about whether they can transform a sidewalk hustler and small-time con man, played by Eddie Murphy, into a high-rolling Master of the Universe?

In their callousness and their cynicism, and their basic selfishness, the dons have behaved like Randolph and Mortimer Duke. It is frankly disgusting.

By ignoring the primacy of academic merit and by engaging in such transparent racial discrimination, Cambridge are actually legitimating some of the nasty and poisonous discourse we can increasingly hear in politics today.

Am I dreaming, or did the leader of the so-called Restore party just suggest that the King can’t be ‘white British’, because his father was born abroad? What is happening to us all?

But if the dons of Cambridge can do it, others will follow their example. There needs to be a full and independent inquiry into what happened and all those involved in the appointment of Jason Arday should get in ahead of the outcome and resign.