It is not only our hapless Prime Minister who supported the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah from an Egyptian prison, with the PM on Friday saying he was ‘delighted’ to be able to welcome him to Britain. Our luvvie community have also long campaigned for el-Fattah’s freedom.
A lengthy list of actors – including Stephen Fry, Olivia Colman, Dame Judi Dench, Carey Mulligan, Bill Nighy, Neil Gaiman and Brian Cox – praised el-Fattah and called for his release from the Egyptian jail where he languished for more than ten years for criticising the authoritarian regime of President Sisi.
Luvvies can almost always be relied upon to make public pronouncements of quite staggeringly naive foolishness when it comes to judging a nasty piece of work like el-Fattah
Admittedly, their protests against el-Fattah’s imprisonment were made before his many vile historic social media posts emerged, which revealed him to have been not just a ‘pro democracy activist’ as they trustingly described him, but what shadow home secretary Chris Philp yesterday called ‘a scumbag’. A man who wrote in social media posts ten years ago that he hated white people, who called British people ‘dogs and monkeys’, wanted the British police and ‘Zionists’ to die violently and wished to burn down Downing Street (he has since apologised for his ‘hurtful’ tweets, some of which he says have been ‘completely twisted out of their meaning’). Yet so far his thespian supporters do not appear to have publicly recanted their backing for him, or even criticised his indefensible violent posts.
This raises all sorts of questions, but for me the most puzzling is why our showbusiness stars so often become left-wing ‘useful idiots’ who take the wrong side in politics. They can almost always be relied upon to make public pronouncements of quite staggeringly naive foolishness when it comes to judging a nasty piece of work like el-Fattah.
It is only in Britain that actors and their ilk are so solidly politically stupid. Even in notoriously liberal Hollywood there are a large number of conservatives and Republicans who proudly call themselves right wingers. This includes a handful of British stars, but it should be noted that generally they ‘came out’ as conservatives once they crossed the pond and established their careers in California: had they stayed on this side of the Atlantic they would never have dared to do so.
Often our famous actors aren’t just vaguely left of centre Labour supporters either. In the 1970s it became fashionable for luvvies to become fun revolutionaries, and several of them signed up to the extremist Trotskyist Workers Revolutionary party, including Corin and Vanessa Redgrave and Frances de la Tour (who played the beloved Miss Jones character in the TV sitcom Rising Damp).
There is of course something rather ridiculous about well-paid middle class actors like Emma Thompson, Brian Cox, Patrick Stewart, and the Redgraves identifying with such progressive causes as oppressed Palestinians or the toiling workers, and perhaps we shouldn’t take their loudly proclaimed politics too seriously. But there is also something slightly sinister in them taking the side of a figure like el-Fattah.
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