The Crime of Killing Marcus Agrippa Postumus

Marcus Agrippa Postumus was the actual grandson of Augustus. Born in 12 BC after his father, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, had already died, he received the name Postumus for that reason. Augustus later adopted him, making the young man both biological grandson and legal son. Ancient writers painted him in dark colours—brutish, fierce, uncultivated—yet recorded no clear crime that justified his fate. He was simply inconvenient.

In AD 6 Augustus banished him, first to Surrentum and then under permanent military guard to the island of Planasia. Shortly after Augustus died on 19 August AD 14, Postumus was killed by his own guards. Tacitus called it the first crime of the new principate. It would not be the last under Tiberius. The question remains: why? One persistent suggestion is that the killing satisfied Livia, who wanted her son Tiberius on the throne without a blood rival who still carried the direct descent of Augustus. By then the succession had already been settled in Tiberius’s favour, yet Postumus’s continued existence was treated as a residual threat that needed removing.

Not every potential rival was disposed of so cleanly. Caligula and Nero—direct descendants of Mark Antony through his daughters with Octavia—were shepherded toward the throne. Antony himself had taken his own life in 30 BC after Actium, an act that may have been intended, among other things, to shield what remained of his family from further official vengeance. His bloodline, however, survived and eventually wore the purple. Nero reached the throne with the energetic help of his mother, Agrippina the Younger, only to have her killed later. Caligula, by contrast, is said to have tried to protect his own mother, Agrippina the Elder, though ultimately in vain.

Maternal ambition in dynastic politics is an old and recurring pattern. The historical record offers many clear examples of mothers who worked, sometimes ruthlessly, to place or keep a son in power:

• Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII of England, spent decades advancing her son’s distant Lancastrian claim during the Wars of the Roses. She forged alliances, raised support and money for his invasion, and helped secure the victory at Bosworth in 1485 that founded the Tudor dynasty.
• Agrippina the Younger, great-granddaughter of Augustus, married her uncle Claudius, secured the adoption of her son Nero over Claudius’s biological son Britannicus, and is accused by ancient sources of poisoning Claudius so that Nero could succeed. She dominated the early years of his reign before their relationship collapsed and he ordered her death.
• Olympias, mother of Alexander the Great, vigorously promoted her son’s position as heir to Philip II. After Philip’s assassination she moved quickly to eliminate rivals and continued to intervene forcefully on behalf of Alexander’s line after his death.
• Bathsheba, in the biblical account of 1 Kings 1–2, intervened with the aging David when Adonijah moved to claim the throne. Working with the prophet Nathan, she reminded the king of a promised succession for Solomon and secured his anointing.
• Catherine de’ Medici, after the death of Henry II, became the dominant political force during the reigns of her three successive sons amid the French Wars of Religion, serving as regent and using every available instrument to keep the Valois dynasty on the throne.
• Empress Matilda, daughter and designated heir of Henry I, fought the long civil war known as the Anarchy. Though she never fully secured the crown for herself, her persistence forced recognition of her son Henry as Stephen’s heir; he succeeded as Henry II and founded the Angevin Empire.

Other notable cases include Galla Placidia as active regent for Valentinian III; Julia Soaemias (with her mother Julia Maesa) engineering the rise of Elagabalus; Yolande of Aragon protecting and advancing the claims of the future Charles VII during the Hundred Years’ War; and Töregene Khatun manoeuvring as regent to secure the election of her son Güyük as Great Khan of the Mongol Empire.

These women operated in very different cultures and centuries, yet the pattern is consistent: kinship, regency rights, claims of legitimacy, strategic alliances, and, when necessary, the removal of rivals. Primary sources are frequently hostile or propagandistic toward ambitious royal women, so modern readers must treat them critically. Still, the political agency these mothers exercised is unmistakable.

The killing of Agrippa Postumus sits at one end of this spectrum—the quiet elimination of a inconvenient blood heir so that another mother’s son could rule without challenge. At the other end stand the mothers who actively engineered their sons’ rise, sometimes only to be destroyed by the very power they had created. Dynastic politics has never been a gentle business, and maternal ambition has often been one of its sharpest instruments.

The tragedy of DEI causing death

Jason Arday’s public story was once held up as pure inspiration. Born Jason Atta Kwei Arday on 9 May 1985 in Clapham, south London, to Ghanaian immigrant parents, he was the third of four brothers. His mother Gifty worked as a mental health nurse and was active in anti-racism causes; his father Joseph was a chef. The family lived in a modest, mould-prone two-bedroom council house in an area marked by poverty, crime and limited opportunity. Clothes were often homemade; meals were stretched for days.

According to the narrative Arday himself promoted in interviews, university profiles and his memoir Great and Unfortunate Things, he was diagnosed at age three with autism and global developmental delay. Doctors, he said, offered bleak forecasts—one allegedly calling him “no better than a vegetable.” He claimed he remained largely non-verbal until just before his twelfth birthday, communicating through sign language, and did not learn to read or write until around eighteen. Speech therapy, his mother’s persistence (using music and lyrics), and later mentors supposedly unlocked language and literacy. He left secondary school (Southfields) with two GCSEs—in physical education and textiles—before completing a BTEC in sport and development at Merton College.

From there the ascent accelerated. He earned a BA in education studies with physical education (validated by the University of Surrey) and an MA in education and pedagogy at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, followed by a PGCE and a PhD in education from Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. Academic posts followed at Leeds Beckett, Roehampton, Durham and Glasgow (where he became a professor of sociology of education). In March 2023, at 37, Cambridge appointed him Professor of Sociology of Education and a fellow of Jesus College—the youngest Black professor in the university’s history. The appointment was celebrated as a diversity triumph. He married Debbie-Ann McKenzie in 2014; they had two children. He spoke of fundraising millions for charity through extreme endurance feats and of overcoming structural barriers of race, class and neurodivergence.

That story collapsed under scrutiny in 2026. Investigations revealed extensive overlaps—more than a hundred passages, in some counts approaching two hundred sentences—between his PhD thesis and earlier work by another scholar, alongside other instances of unattributed or poorly attributed material in published papers. Multiple claimed affiliations (visiting professorships, a published book) were denied by the institutions involved. Extreme athletic and fundraising claims (30 marathons in 35 days, 600 miles in six days, £5.5 million raised) lacked supporting evidence and were scaled back or contradicted by records. Schoolmates and others contested the severity of the non-verbal, illiterate childhood account. Arday denied intentional plagiarism or fabrication, attributing errors to autism-related mimicry and inadequate supervision, and framed much of the criticism as racially motivated. Cambridge initially defended him; after further information emerged it opened an investigation into his qualifications and appointment. He resigned on 5 August 2026. Nine days later he was found dead at a property in Battersea at age 41. Police treated the death as unexpected but not suspicious.

The personal tragedy is real and final. A 41-year-old man is dead; his family has lost a husband, father, son and brother. That fact should not be minimised. Yet it does not erase the other, quieter tragedies his elevation and fall illuminate.

Every time an institution prioritises demographic targets or narrative fit over demonstrated competence, better-qualified candidates are displaced. People who spent years building genuine expertise in research methods, subject mastery and rigorous scholarship lose opportunities not because they were weaker, but because their skin colour or background did not supply the preferred story. The cost is not abstract. It is measured in rejected applications, stalled careers, and a gradual corrosion of standards at places that once claimed excellence as their primary mission. Cambridge’s own later review of appointments implicitly acknowledged that processes had been strained. When the chosen candidate’s record then unravels into plagiarism and embellishment, the institution’s credibility is damaged further, and every honest scholar—especially those from minority backgrounds who succeeded on merit—pays a reputational price.

Worse is the complicity. Close associates, mentors and institutional sponsors who knew or should have known the gaps in the record still advanced and celebrated the narrative. The memoir and public persona were marketed as inspirational precisely because the obstacles were portrayed as near-insurmountable. When those obstacles prove exaggerated or invented, the inspiration collapses into propaganda. Defending the story by labelling scrutiny as racism or ableism only deepens the dishonesty.

The episode also exposed institutional overreach. A journalist investigating the academic record was reported for harassment; the Metropolitan Police spent months looking into legitimate journalistic inquiries before closing the matter and still warning the reporter not to contact Arday further because of alleged impact on mental health. An academic who raised earlier questions faced similar complaints. High-powered lawyers were engaged to deter coverage. When ordinary professional questions can trigger police involvement under the cover of racism allegations, the ability to test public claims is chilled. That is not protection of the vulnerable; it is insulation of preferred narratives from evidence.

These patterns are not unique to one Cambridge hire. Commercial and operational examples illustrate the same inversion of priorities:

• Bud Light’s 2023 partnership with a transgender influencer produced a sustained consumer boycott, sharp sales declines (reports of 25–30 per cent drops in key periods), loss of category leadership, and executive departures.
• Target’s Pride merchandise and related DEI/supplier initiatives triggered backlash, sales softness and subsequent scaling-back of goals.
• A senior DEI executive who worked at Nike and Meta pleaded guilty to wire fraud involving roughly $5 million siphoned through fake vendors and falsified expenses.
• Boeing’s quality and safety failures have multiple long-term causes, yet critics noted the addition of DEI and climate metrics to executive incentives alongside production pressure; the company later dismantled its standalone DEI department and refocused pay on safety and quality.
• FAA changes to air-traffic-controller screening in the 2010s, introduced explicitly to increase demographic diversity, reduced reliance on proven training pipelines; chronic understaffing followed, and later incidents prompted debate over whether lowered cognitive/skills thresholds contributed to risk (official statements reject a direct causal link to any specific crash).
• Leadership decisions at DC Water under a CEO hired amid diversity framing were followed by a massive wastewater spill; causal attribution remains contested.

In each case the common thread is the elevation of signalling and demographic outcomes above competence, verification and risk management. When the inevitable failures or frauds appear, institutions often double down, attack critics, or quietly retreat while leaving the underlying incentives intact.

Arday’s death is a human tragedy. The larger tragedy is a system that rewards compelling stories over verifiable achievement, that treats demographic checkboxes as substitutes for excellence, and that then treats legitimate questions as moral crimes. Better candidates were passed over. Standards were diluted. Trust was eroded. And when the edifice cracked, a man paid the ultimate price while the machinery that elevated him continues, largely unreformed. Merit is not bigotry. Rigour is not racism. The refusal to say so clearly has already cost more than one life.

Oliver Cromwell: A Man of Contradictions

Oliver Cromwell never uttered the famous passage so often attributed to him when he dismissed the Rump Parliament in April 1653. That fiery tirade—“It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place… In the name of God, go!”—is an eighteenth-century political squib, a later invention dressed up as history. Yet its tone still resonates. The contempt for a self-serving political class, the charge of selling the public good for private gain, the demand that those who have failed their trust simply leave: these are sentiments that many citizens, across centuries, have wanted to hurl at their rulers.

Cromwell’s own beginnings were modest and rooted in the lesser gentry of eastern England. Born on 25 April 1599 in Huntingdon, he was the only surviving son of Robert Cromwell, a local landowner, justice of the peace and occasional parliamentarian, and Elizabeth Steward. The family had risen through a distant connection to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s minister; Oliver’s great-great-grandfather had married Thomas’s sister, and the name and some former monastic lands came with that alliance. He grew up with seven sisters in a household that was comfortable but not grand. After his father’s death in 1617, the eighteen-year-old Oliver left Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, without a degree to manage the family estate and support his widowed mother and unmarried sisters. He may have studied a little law at Lincoln’s Inn in London, but for the next two decades his life was that of a working country gentleman and farmer—first in Huntingdon, later in St Ives and Ely—collecting rents, farming, and serving as a local magistrate.

In 1620 he married Elizabeth Bourchier, daughter of a prosperous London merchant with Puritan leanings. The marriage was long and affectionate; they had nine children, of whom six reached adulthood. Cromwell experienced a profound religious conversion in the late 1620s or early 1630s that shaped everything that followed. He became a convinced Puritan, certain that God’s providence directed his path. That same intensity later produced both the disciplined leadership of the New Model Army and the severity that stained his name in Ireland.

Cromwell hated corruption and self-interest in high places, yet the regime he headed as Lord Protector could not escape the charge of authoritarian overreach. He was a man of intense conviction who genuinely believed he was an instrument of divine will. That conviction produced extraordinary military success and, at the same time, terrible severity. It is one thing to hold firm ideals; it is another to enforce them at the point of the sword. The massacres at Drogheda and Wexford remain a permanent stain. His military dictatorship, the rule of the Major-Generals, and the repeated dissolution of parliaments that disappointed him showed how easily zeal for righteousness can slide into the exercise of unchecked power.

In that sense the English Civil Wars and the Commonwealth experiment were a kind of rehearsal for later revolutions. Authority was broken, a king was tried and executed, and a new order was imposed by force of arms and ideology. The public ultimately rejected the experiment. Within two years of Cromwell’s death the monarchy was restored. Something similar occurred after the French Revolution: the cycle of radical purification, terror, and authoritarian consolidation ended in a return to more traditional forms of rule. History does not repeat itself neatly, but it does rhyme. Populations that have endured prolonged upheaval and moral coercion often choose stability over purity.

The time-travel question

What if Cromwell could step into the present and confront those who, in the name of public health or electoral necessity, stretched or overrode ordinary justice during the pandemic years and the contested 2020 American election? The question is speculative, but not empty.

A seventeenth-century Puritan who had fought kings over arbitrary power, who had insisted that even a monarch was under law, and who had dissolved a parliament he judged corrupt, would almost certainly view large-scale emergency rule with suspicion. He would recognise the pattern: emergency powers justified by crisis, dissent treated as moral failure or danger to the community, and ordinary legal restraints set aside for the greater good. Cromwell’s own career showed both the temptation and the cost of that logic. He had used soldiers to clear a parliament; he had imposed moral and religious discipline by force. He also lived long enough to see how quickly such methods breed resentment and how fragile the resulting order becomes once the strong man is gone.

He would likely have little patience for elites who claimed special insight or moral superiority while exempting themselves from the rules they imposed on others. The language of the forged speech—mercenary motives, bartered conscience, contempt for the common good—would fit his temper. Whether he would have endorsed particular claims of electoral irregularity or specific pandemic policies is unknowable; he was a man of his own age, not ours. What can be said is that a leader who had watched one form of absolute authority replace another, and who had seen the public eventually tire of both, would be wary of any system that concentrates power, suppresses scrutiny, and treats disagreement as illegitimate.

Cromwell remains useful precisely because he refuses to be a simple hero or simple villain. From the quiet responsibilities of a country gentleman supporting his mother and sisters to the heights of military command and the lonely exercise of near-absolute power, his life exposes the permanent tension between the desire for clean government and the dangers of those who believe themselves clean enough to impose it by force. The forged speech still circulates because the frustration it expresses is perennial. The historical Cromwell reminds us that the same zeal that topples one set of abuses can easily generate another.