Brace yourself! Celebrities are on the march. As Keir Starmer’s premiership fades into irrelevance and Reform gears up to fight a general election, stars of stage and screen are ready and waiting to let the public know whose side they are on. But fear not. While their anti-Farage venom may be all too predictable, there’s still fun to be had in watching the virtue-signallers tie themselves in knots.
This is positively erudite compared to Hugh Grant, who simply told Nigel Farage to ‘go f*** yourself’
Posh chef-turned-eco-warrior Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was at it in the Times yesterday. ‘There’s so much I don’t like about Reform. I hate its take on immigration,’ he moans. Only a churl would point out that being educated at Eton and Oxford before landing a lucrative television presenting gig probably insulates one from the social and economic impacts of mass migration.
But Hugh has started, so he’ll finish. Reform ‘is proving how unfit it is for office in a lot of councils. Nigel Farage is such a negative force in politics. They are winning support on a totally false promise, much as Trump has done in the US.’
Before we yawn at the predictability of his views, Fearnley-Whittingstall pulls a rabbit out of the bag: ‘I’m excited that the Greens are winning and to be a member of the party at this time.’ He’s not then as drippy as he appears. To move, in the same breath, from criticising Reform for being unfit for office, to praising Zack Polanski’s Green Party really takes nerves of steel.
Fearnley-Whittingstall is not the only one knocking Reform on its competence. Steve Coogan got there almost a year ago. After criticising both Labour and the Conservative Party, and branding Farage ‘a racist clown’, Alan Partridge, sorry – Coogan – claimed: ‘Reform couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery.’ Fair enough, if that’s his view. But his party of choice? He apparently ‘agreed wholeheartedly’ with Zarah Sultana’s decision to quit the Labour Party and team up with Jeremy Corbyn to form Your Party, the radical left-wing group that lasted all of one weekend before disintegrating thanks to factional infighting and ideological splits. What was that about breweries, Steve?
Still, credit where it’s due. Coogan had another bash. Earlier this year he said, ‘I am worried about the erosion of human rights and viewing the idea of human rights as some sort of impediment and how Reform are anti-human rights because they think it’s some red tape bureaucracy.’ And this is positively erudite compared to Hugh Grant, who simply told Nigel Farage to ‘go f*** yourself’ after the Reform leader mooted the idea of a referendum on net zero.
Grant takes us deep into luvvie territory. There we find Brian Cox, the Shakespearean actor and Succession star who never knowingly keeps his opinions to himself. His view on Farage? ‘I find him very venal, quite honestly, as an individual. He’s selfish and he’s on the whole quite uninformed.’ Unlike Cox, we must conclude. ‘I am just dazzled at the way a lot of people have been seduced by him, because he’s a bit of a bully,’ he continued.
Bullying, you say? Cox might know what he’s on about here. After all, he counteracted accusations regarding his own short temper last year by first dismissing them as ‘woke nonsense’ and then putting them down to generational differences. Is it possible that Cox might just have more in common with Farage than he thinks?
Others chomping at the bit to let us know their views on the Reform leader include Jennifer Saunders, who, having gone from Absolutely Fabulous to Celebrity Gogglebox, declared from the comfort of her own sofa that Farage is a ‘great talking sewage pipe.’ It didn’t tickle my funny bone but, to be fair, it was better than comedian Joe Lycett’s attempts at humour. In a ‘letter’ to Farage, posted on X, he asked: ‘Are all immigrants bad or is it ok if they come from Europe and then become your wife?’. By the time he got to, ‘Even though you say you’re not a racist do you think some racists use your words as encouragement to do racist things?’ he wasn’t even trying.
Then there’s Call the Midwife actress Helen George who seemed confused about the line between fantasy and reality, as she warned: ‘I feel like we could turn around in a few years and it’s The Handmaid’s Tale’. George also seems confused about where her 1960’s midwife character ends and her twenty-first-century self begins, as she laments the growing influence of Nigel Farage as an alarming development for women’s rights: ‘The anti-abortion laws and things. I feel like they will probably be debated in Parliament, especially if Nigel Farage has his way,’ she said.
Perhaps it’s unfair to single out these particular actors and comedians. After all, they are only following in the footsteps of Gary Lineker, Paloma Faith, Stewart Lee, Rosie Jones, Sandi Toksvig and every other celebrity who thinks promoting a new show means the Great British public needs to know their views.
But we should not despair. If their opinions do not make us laugh, at least we can console ourselves with the decade-old lesson from the EU Referendum. No one gives a hoot what celebrities think about anything.
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