BK

In 2013, the man who would become Anurag Mohindru KC told the panel interviewing him for a prestigious position 23 Essex Street that he had studied at Oxford. Asked for his CV so the claim could be checked, he edited it to say he had read medicine there for a year, and because he's a man of taste and saw that his fraudulent resume required some leavening texture he added a cricket blue he never won. After all, who ever heard of a less-than-well-rounded Oxford man? The Bar's tribunal called Mohindru's false claim a "reckless, foolish and completely unnecessary lie", found he had "doubled down", and disbarred him. On 3 July in the High Court, however, Mr Justice Johnson restored Mohindru to the practice of law with a sentence that deserves engraving above the door of every chambers in London: "It would be wrong to impose the ultimate sanction merely because dishonesty is present." 'Merely.' Mohindru is now is free to resume his career spent testing other people's honesty under oath. It seems like Britain is running an epidemic of fraudulent self-invention at the moment, and running a second epidemic underneath it: the organised defence of the people caught doing it. Jason Arday resigned his Cambridge chair and his Jesus College fellowship on 5 August, the day the university finally opened an investigation into his academic record. You've heard it all by now. The allegations, raised in July, are that passages of his thesis and published papers copy other scholars without attribution, and that celebrated elements of his life story sit awkwardly beside the available record. He denies the lot; Liverpool John Moores examined the plagiarism claims against work done there and found "honest and reasonable error"; nothing is yet proven, and the investigation can take its course. Cambridge stood by him for weeks and, on the day he resigned, announced it would "continue to provide support to him". The Good Law Project circulated a letter, signed by more than 24 academics and politicians, describing the examination of a public academic's public record as a "smear campaign". Validating a man's CV is now an act of aggression, provided the man is the right sort. Elsewhere, Zholia Alemi practised as an NHS psychiatrist for 22 years on a forged University of Auckland degree, having left her course in its 1st year. She detained patients. She was convicted of 20 offences of fraud and forgery in 2023, sentenced to 7 years, and has since been ordered to repay £406,624 of the £1m-plus she drew in salary. The forgery was exposed by a local reporter in Carlisle, who managed in an afternoon the check the General Medical Council had not performed in 22 years. Still elsewhere, more than 700 healthcare workers have been guilty of obtaining or seeking UK nursing registration through tests sat by paid proxies at a single test centre in Nigeria; the investigation swept up nearly 2,000 nurses; hundreds of them stayed on wards while it ran; 48 were asked to sit the exam again. The scheme was described in the proceedings as fraud on an industrial scale, and the regulator processed it at the pace of a parish council. And 2 weeks ago, on 24 July, Maidstone Crown Court gave Amran Hussain, 40, of Westerham, 4 years. Hussain applied for 2,071 NHS posts and landed 13 of them, worth £168,072.41, on the basis of him supposedly holding MSc degrees from Oxford and Birkbeck that nobody could verify, memberships of professional institutes that nobody could confirm, a directorship at an NHS trust he never held, and references supplied from NHS email accounts he himself controlled: the service wrote to ask whether Hussain could be trusted, and Hussain replied warmly that he could. Once he got in-post he went off sick until each contract died; how laughably appropriate that his one sincere engagement with the NHS was its sickness policy. 4 years, richly deserved. Hussain had no college behind him, no chambers, no campaign group, no letter with 24 signatures. The institutions doing the forgiving hold a doctrine. The CV may be a genre of self-marketing, and everybody may round the odd number up; but outright self-invention is quite another thing. Still, these places allow it. To them, dishonesty is just a lapse, an episode in a wellness journey, treatable with reflection and a statement about learning. Consequences are for outsiders. To them, the audit and the reckoning is the real offence, to be called disproportionate, vindictive or racist according to the defendant's profile and connections. Who pays? The candidate who told the truth and came 2nd, 13 separate times, to Hussain. The junior barrister who put her real university on the form at 23 Essex Street. The patients detained on the judgement of a psychiatrist with 1 year of study and 22 of practice. Do they know? The judge wrote "dishonesty is present" into the reinstatement itself. It is on the record in his own hand. This must all end. It is a practice of formalised dishonesty not known in public life in these isles for centuries. It will not be brought back. Progress's National Anti-Corruption Act stands up a 500-strong unit, the Malebranche, at the centre of government, with independent power to investigate and prosecute white-collar crime, procurement fraud and institutional corruption, and it pays whistleblowers up to 10% of recovered funds for exposing fraud inside public or private institutions, with criminal sanctions for any employer who retaliates. The first line of that policy reads: "If you're a white-collar criminal, there will be no worse place to be in Europe than Britain." We wrote the sentence before this summer's parade of the forgiven, and the parade has been making our argument for us ever since. This country runs, hour by hour, on the honesty of people whose honesty is rarely if ever honoured, merely taken for granted: the electrician whose certificate is real, the nurse whose exam was her own, the accountant whose letters were earned. Above them sits a class that treats truthfulness as a courtesy, extended and withheld among friends. A thoroughly Third World attitude. The defenders of the fraudulent are organised, lettered and funded. Organise against them. Progress is where that is being done, and the entry requirement is the one Mohindru failed: be what you say you are.