In response to my recent coverage and takes on the Jason Arday scandal at Cambridge University, a certain long-time reader and friend jokingly accused me of ‘predictable anti-Cantabrigianism’: that is, a hostility to all things Cambridge given that I myself am an Oxford alumnus. But the truth is that I am more than happy to point out failings at my own alma mater, whether in terms of some teaching staff they have hired or some students they have taken on. In the former category, a notorious example in my mind is Tariq Ramadan, a vapid hypocrite guilty of serial infidelity who was obviously only hired because Qatar offered a pot-load of money to make him a professor, though his appointment did upset more serious scholars specialised in Middle East and Islamic studies at Oxford, from what I understand.
In the latter category, and from my own Oxford college of Brasenose in particular, we have the case of alumnus Faiz Siddiqui, who can reasonably be seen as epitomising the behaviour of a spoiled, entitled manchild. Ironically, the manchild embodies the very opposite of what his name means, given that Faiz is an Arabic name meaning ‘one who wins/succeeds.’ What we instead have is a person who has gained notoriety for losing a series of high-profile, ridiculous lawsuits he has brought, blaming others for his failures in life and demanding life-time support as though he were entitled to it. Perhaps one can also take comfort in the fact that his story shows that studying at Oxford or Cambridge is not some essential or automatic key to success in life- a useful point I recall one of the staff at Brasenose saying as I was preparing to take an entrance exam at the college along with other applicants.
By way of preface, I have partially been inspired to do this post by the site ‘Courtwatch’, which has a knack for picking up interesting cases and rulings in U.S. courtrooms. Its editor- Seamus Hughes- is a long-time friend and I would urge you to check the site out.
In short: while the black sheep of Brasenose was mainly in the media spotlight years ago for two high-profile failed lawsuits, he has still been pursuing legal claims that are equally if not more cringeworthy.
The manchild first gained media notoriety in 2016 for his attempt to sue Oxford University, demanding financial compensation on the basis that the university offered ‘negligently inadequate’ teaching for a Modern History exam paper focused on documentary evidence from a short period in British imperial history in India (1916-1934). Faiz obtained a very poor result in that paper, which contributed to an overall low 2.1 (upper second-class) degree, supposedly preventing him from realising a successful career in law on account of alleged psychiatric injury. The exam itself was based on the concept of ‘gobbets’, which will be familiar to many students of humanities disciplines at Oxford. A ‘gobbets’ paper or section consists of a selection of excerpts from a syllabus of set texts for a module, with the student required to produce a short commentary on some of those excerpts (normally you have an option to choose which ones to comment on from the selection), explaining the context and importance of the extract.
The manchild photographed during his attempt to sue Oxford University.
Leaving aside the wholly implausible chain of causation regarding how the exam result supposedly impacted Faiz’s life (for one thing, he secured a training contract at a world-renowned law firm- Clifford Chance), a key to success in a gobbets paper is that you have to read and study the entire syllabus of set texts. If you neglect to study a substantial portion of them, there is a big risk that you will have to do gobbets for texts you have not studied and thus you will do poorly in the exam. A fatal aspect to Faiz’s case of ‘negligently inadequate’ teaching in my view is that he admitted his reading of the set texts was selective. He sought to shift the blame to the teaching staff, citing a lack of coverage of much of the set texts syllabus in classes. Yet I remember doing gobbets as part of some of my papers at Oxford, and for papers where the set texts syllabus was relatively large, it was only feasible to cover a small sample of the set texts with tutors in order to get some idea as to how a gobbet might be tackled. There simply was not the time to cover all the set texts in classes and tutorials, and an important aspect of learning at that stage was to read and study the set texts yourself. What was true back in 2014 was surely also true back in 2000 when the manchild was doing his Final exams, and the judge rightly faulted him for his ‘inadequate preparation’ as opposed to ‘inadequate teaching.’
More generally, the manchild tried to claim that the university had not made reasonable adjustments or taken into his account supposed anxiety, depression and insomnia he was suffering at the time of his exams. While it is my understanding from testimony I have seen that the manchild was renowned at Brasenose for having ‘issues’ during his time there, it was correctly noted that there was no way such generalised conditions, if he were indeed suffering from them, could have been taken into account for the exams. If he had been too unwell to take his exams, he could have withdrawn, ‘rusticated’ (taken a year out) and sat them in the following year.
The judge, who dismissed Faiz’s claim in February 2018, concluded with sound advice for the claimant, suggesting he ‘refocus’ and ‘lower his expectations at least for the time being.’ But the manchild took things to the extreme, apparently deciding that he is permanently ‘disabled’ (primarily because of his mental health issues) and consequently unable to work at all. With the manchild remaining unemployed and wholly dependent on his very wealthy parents for financial support, the parents eventually decided- after a deterioration in relations with him- to substantially reduce their support to around $2000 a month (still very generous by any standard), while still allowing him to live rent free in a flat they own in London.
For Faiz, though, this reduction in support was an act of great cruelty, and fearing he would lose his support entirely, he decided that his best course of action was…to sue his parents in a bid to get a court order for lifelong financial maintenance. The claim, which would have set a precedent and was indeed novel in British legal history, included a submission on the manchild’s behalf that he was a ‘vulnerable’ adult because, in part, he is ‘wholly unlikely to be able to get, far less maintain, any employment position at all, still less one commensurate with either his high intellect or the level of his education and educational attainment.’ Thankfully, the judge Sir James Munby (who died this year) dismissed the case in 2020, and Faiz’s application for permission to appeal was rejected in 2021.
Both of these cases attracted widespread media attention and derision, and one might have thought that after facing such high-profile losses and humiliation, the manchild would have realised that his best way forward was to give up his obsession with costly litigation and take advantage of his privilege to develop new skills or forge a new worthwhile career path: perhaps becoming a historian or novelist, or buckling down and retraining for a new job.
But documents that have emerged this year show that litigation has remained the manchild’s key passion: ‘pertinacious’ indeed, as Munby highlighted in his judgement. For one thing, for more than a decade he has been involved in a dispute with a certain Erum Majid Randhawa, a resident of Connecticut, with aspects of the case having reached the U.S. Supreme Court this year. The origin of the dispute is essentially that Erum rejected his romantic advances- something that angered Faiz to the point that he started harassing her. Eventually, Erum filed a complaint with the police, which issued an arrest warrant that remains in force. Faiz, for his part, has refused to come to the United States so that the warrant can be served. Instead, he has spent years litigating in the courts against Erum and also filed a lawsuit against a Connecticut police officer.
Back on home soil on the other side of the pond, the manchild continues to believe that he is entitled to lifetime support from his parents as a matter of legal right. In April this year, the law firm Faiz relies on- Dale Langley Solicitors- wrote a letter to the executive officer of the scrutiny unit of the House of Commons, suggesting a repeal of a paragraph of the Children Act 1989 on the basis that it prevents the ‘adult disabled children’ of cohabiting parents from applying for financial orders against their parents- one of the legal issues that came up in Faiz’s case. The same letter says that the manchild attended an event in November 2025 where he met one of the UK’s Supreme Court justices (Lord Briggs) and discussed his case, with Lord Briggs supposedly ‘incredulous’ at the Court of Appeal’s rejection of Faiz’s case.
As this obstinacy on the manchild’s part suggests, he has not understood an important lesson from his failed attempt to sue his parents: namely, don’t bite the hands of those who feed you. Court documents that have come out in June and July this year reveal that the manchild has lost yet another case: this time, to sue the Financial Ombudsman Service with an insurance company (ARAG) as the ‘interested party’, because of the refusal to grant him legal insurance cover for the purpose of…initiating legal proceedings against his father. After a period in which relations supposedly improved between the manchild and his father, things took a turn for the worse in 2024 when his father (who lives in the UAE and is reportedly suffering from cancer and other ailments, which are an obvious impediment to travel) apparently failed to keep a promise to visit the manchild in London, as a result of which the manchild furiously berated him, calling him a ‘stupid asshole’ and a ‘lying swine.’ What a lovely way to speak of a father who has supported you so generously over the years.
Understandably, the father wanted his manchild son to stop contacting him because of this horrible abuse, and had lawyers inform the son that his actions constituted violations of Emirati Electronic Crimes Law, warning him to desist from contact or face consequences. The essence of the manchild’s case is that since the insurance policies he had allowed for covering legal costs to initiate a claim in the event of ‘injury’ caused by a ‘specific or sudden accident,’ he was entitled to insurance to cover legal costs for initiating a claim against his father, on the basis that receipt of the letter from his father’s solicitors caused ‘psychiatric injury.’ Simply put, the manchild had no valid basis for his claim for insurance here because the issuing and receipt of the letter could not be reasonably interpreted as constituting an ‘accident’ that caused injury. Rather, whatever the psychological impact the letter had, it was an outcome that the manchild himself might not have foreseen but could have been expected anyway given how viciously he berated his father and the prior history of tensions in the relationship.
The result of the manchild’s failed claim is that he must now pay legal costs, and quite predictably he called for a stay of execution, on the basis that he supposedly does not have the means to pay the costs and that enforcement created the risk of an imminent heart attack or stroke. The medical evidence was submitted on his behalf by his treating psychiatrist, which was rightly dismissed for reasons such as the fact that he did not explain how he is qualified to comment on cardiovascular health. Further, the manchild did not provide a proper disclosure of his assets.
It is in fact clear from all these cases that the manchild is intelligent, and he had various opportunities that gave him a better start than most. The simple truth is that his failings- whether in his exams or professional career- are his own fault, whether because of over-anxiousness, laziness, rudeness or other shortcomings he could have remedied or sought to address. His reported ‘disability’ has not prevented him from actively engaging in multiple cases of litigation and applying his intellect to them in a bid to advance cases that are nonetheless hopeless to anyone with common sense. As Munby put it in his judgement:
‘Moreover, even if it be the fact that the applicant [the manchild] is vulnerable, it has never been suggested that he lacks capacity either to litigate or to manage his affairs; and the documents he has himself prepared demonstrate his intellectual abilities. Vulnerability does not confer a licence to litigate with impunity.’
German analyst Tobias Schneider suggests that to be long-term unemployed in the modern West, you should suffer from one or more of the following problems: (i) you are ‘severely mentally ill or handicapped,’ (ii) you are extremely lazy, (iii) you have a severe personality disorder that makes it impossible for people to be around you. I concur and strongly suggest that (ii) and (iii) apply in the manchild’s case. He has been used to a lifetime of privilege and generous financial and other material support and prefers to direct his mental capacity towards litigation, having convinced himself he can never get a real job.
To conclude: I loved studying at Oxford and will always remember my days fondly there. But while both Oxford and Cambridge are world-leading universities, they are nonetheless institutions run by humans and mistakes are made, whether in sometimes hiring the wrong staff or sometimes admitting the wrong students. I am fairly sure Oxford feels the same way now about the manchild, whose own failings surely embody the definition of being a loser.
Thanks for this update. “Pertinacious” was a favourite word of the late James Munby, who as a judge had had long experience of pertinacious litigants like Siddiqui.
I wrote about his claim against his parents for maintenance in my pre-Substack days, here https://abarbararich.medium.com/the-prodigal-son-in-modern-life-6df8886aaa16
It’s hard to think of anything more quintessentially pertinacious than looking for evidence to try and repeal a statutory provision to buttress a failed claim for maintenance as an adult. What a waste of the man’s intellectual ability it all is.
With a record of success like that, I'm sure secure employment at the Good Law Project is his for the taking.