Patrick West

The actors are out in force again, speaking politics. Only days after Brian Cox appeared on the BBC bemoaning that Brexit is reducing our GDP by 4 per cent, this weekend Dame Emma Thompson led thousands at a Restore Nature Now march in London. The protest was designed to draw attention to the plight of nature and the climate, and was attended by charities, businesses and direct action groups. Actors at their worst are a notoriously shallow and vain lot During the march, the national treasure, millionaire and jet-setter Thompson was asked if she supported Just Stop Oil, days after the group had vandalised Stonehenge. 'I think I support anyone who fights this extraordinary battle,’ she replied. 'We cannot take any more oil out of the ground. I mean, there's much argument about it.

You may laugh. You may have gasped in disbelief. But yes, it’s true, we now have a new socio-economic classification, known collectively as the ‘working class, benefit class, criminal class, and/or underclass’. This, is at least, is the latest addition to the list of ‘traditionally disadvantaged groups’ especially welcomed by The Camden People’s Theatre, North London, in a job advert – alongside the more familiar(-ish) categories of ‘D/deaf and/or disabled’, ‘neurodiverse’, ‘LGBTQ+’ and that other newby for our times: ‘global majority’. This new umbrella category was made known on X by charity worker Anne-Marie Canning on Monday, and the advert has since gone viral, attracting much derision, not least for its anachronistic and confused taxonomy.

Much has been made in recent weeks, and especially in recent days, about the degrees of ignorance often displayed by those protesting for the people of Gaza and Palestine. To put it pithily, many don’t seem to know from which river and to which sea they chant about with such passion. Such ignorance has prompted some to conclude that these protests are less about showing solidarity with beleaguered Palestinians and more an excuse to vent incoherent anti-Western sentiment, or, more sinisterly, old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Some of the protestors have been replicating what they believe to be the conditions in Gaza Similarly, the cosplay in evidence at university campuses in the USA has also cast doubt on the authenticity of these demonstrations.

The battle over sexism and equality at the Garrick Club continues to rumble on. It was revealed yesterday that several of its members, including Stephen Fry, Sting, and Dire Straits frontman, Mark Knopfler, had put their name to a letter threatening to quit the Garrick unless members vote to admit women. They have been joined by luminaries from the world of theatre, film and television, who had been warned that they were in an untenable position because of a ‘very public controversy’ over the issue. The broadcaster John Simpson pronounced on X yesterday that he and many others ‘would also find it impossible to stay’ if the club didn’t open its doors to women. This is the luvvie-spat that just won’t go away.

As a conservative non-smoker who in his youth was a libertarian twenty-a-day man, I can see both sides of the argument over the government’s recent anti-smoking legislation. Sure, cigarettes can be delicious, and it’s entirely up to the adult individual, not the state, whether he or she decides to light up. But as I finally came to accept eleven years ago, smoking is also a profoundly stupid habit, and if government interference can prevent people ever taking it up, then so be it. I was fervently against the 2007 smoking ban in pubs, but came to acknowledge that it greatly helped in the process of de-normalising smoking. And de-normalised smoking has thoroughly become. History has no guiding spirit, direction or end goal.

Foreign wars have the unfortunate side-effect of bringing out the self-regarding narcissist in people. This is made all the more pronounced in our era of social media, in which some types appear to think that mere tweets can stop wars, and that an appropriately-altered Facebook profile might bring about world peace. The latest casualty in this regard has been local government. And I don’t just mean the Scottish government and the Scottish National party, who have had delusions of grandeur long before the Israel-Gaza conflagration begun. I mean local, provincial councils.

Are the culture wars real? Some assume that they're an imaginary affair, or, at best, a distraction from the real, pressing bread-and-butter concerns of today. As Matthew Syed put it in the Sunday Times yesterday: ‘The culture wars...may be seen not as genuine debates but as a form of Freudian displacement. The woke and anti-woke need each other to engage in piffling spats as a diversion from realities they both find too psychologically threatening to confront.’ We are familiar with this line of thinking, both from left and right. The culture wars about race and gender are irrelevant and ‘piffling’, so some say. It’s all fuss and nonsense.

The government’s proposal to overhaul and tighten betting laws, ostensibly to target problem gamblers, has understandably raised concerns about government interference and nanny-state overreach. Yet viewed from a wider perspective, we should welcome these initiatives and for the precedent they could set: they could be the final recognition that young adults do not reach maturity until the age of 25.  As part of its gambling curbs the government will place ‘enhanced’ checks on the finances of under-25s, amid concerns that they’re less able to ‘regulate’ their impulses and make rational decisions. For example, the under-25s will have stakes limited to a maximum of between £2 and £4 for online slot machines.

Ever since Monty Python created their internecine, bickering and ridiculous groups of freedom fighters – the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front – for their 1979 film The Life of Brian, it’s always been easy and tempting to mock and deride the fissiparous nature of ideologues and tin-pot revolutionaries. Those who believe in the purity of a cause tend to have a semi-religious mindset – and consequently one semi-divorced from reality – which brooks no heresy from orthodoxy. Thus extreme, quasi-cult movements are always prone to split into factions.

The veteran BBC show Have I Got News for You is ‘due to become BBC television’s only satirical comedy show’. This is the likely result of The Ranganation – also a panel show which dissects the week’s news – reportedly being cancelled. Satire at the BBC has been vanishing alarmingly quickly. Only last week the corporation announced the end of Frankie Boyle’s New World Order, amid dwindling viewership. Mock the Week was cancelled last year, while The Mash Report was put to bed in 2021 (to be revived as Late Night Mash on Dave, only to suffer the double indignity of being cancelled again earlier this month).