Quotations attributed to an eyewitness in the Daily Mail’s annual coverage of Caesarian Sunday were in fact produced in a hoax phone call, Varsity has learned from a source at the satirical student website, The Porter’s Log.

In an article on the incident at Jesus Green earlier this afternoon, which saw a student being initiated into a Sidney Sussex College drinking society set on fire, the Mail turned to testimony from “second year history student Marcus Atherton, from Peterhouse College.”

However, Atherton does not actually exist, and is in fact a stock character used in The Porter’s Log’s satirical articles. For instance, Atherton featured in a recent Porter’s Log’s piece in the guise of “Marcus Athertonstein”, a representative of the facetious “Birmingham Elders of Zion” organisation.

Atherton has also appeared in other Porter’s Log pieces as a professor celebrating Cambridge beating Oxford in the latest university rankings on “the gold-paved streets” of the city and as the leader of the “Better Off Out” campaign pushing for Trinity College’s independence from the rest of the university.

Varsity’s source, who is an editor at The Porter’s Log, said that: “The fact that they didn’t either bother to check whether Marcus Atherton was fictional or not shows that they’re only too happy to take absolute drivel and nonsense and feed their readers’ stereotypes.”

The Porter’s Log is a satirical student website that was launched in November 2015, produced by undergraduates and postgraduates across around 10 Cambridge colleges, which aims to “cast a satirical eye over Cambridge.”

In the Mail, Atherton was quoted as being “really shocked and quite disgusted by a lot of people on the green,” saying that: “There was nudity, people throwing beer and bottles at each other, even people urinating on each other. I have nothing against drinking societies, but this was a lot worse than last year.”

“It’s beyond a joke, it’s not even funny,” said a Porter’s Log editor speaking to Varsity. “Everyone knows the kind of story the Daily Mail wants to run on Caesarian Sunday, because it’s the same thing year in, year out.”

They told Varsity that they called the Mail after learning that the national newspaper were keen to talk to someone who had been at Jesus Green this afternoon. Speaking to one of the journalists credited in the byline of the Mail article at around 7 o’clock, they proceeded to give an outraged account of today’s goings-on, resorting to cliches. The quotes attributed to Atherton appeared in an updated article shortly afterwards.

Commenting on the fake name they gave the Mail, they said that, as with other recurring Porter’s Log characters, the website has made sure that there aren’t any actual students with the same name, meaning that – had the Mail checked the veracity of the eye-witness account – they would have discovered that Atherton was, in fact, made up.

However, they were quick to clarify what their intentions in orchestrating the trick were: “To be clear, we’re not defending drinking societies or lad culture, we just object to everyone being tarred with the same brush. Some people at Jesus Green were just there for a quiet drink.”

Edit 2nd May: the Daily Mail has now removed the comments from its website.