Dear America,

I write today on behalf of a small and bewildered country in the North Atlantic which, until recently, answered to the name Great Britain. You might recall that the people of these islands invented parliamentary democracy and gave the world the Industrial Revolution. We were long famed for standing agreeably in queues and talking politely about the weather. Many of us still consider these achievements evidence of civilisation.

It is, then, with a heavy heart that we require your immediate assistance in a very grave matter. Our country is in peril, governed as we are by technocrats determined to ruin the nation they inherited.

Accordingly, I ask you to invade.

Before you object that such things are normally reserved for oil states and clerical fascists, allow me to outline the present situation. Britain today is run by a strange cohort of people who have been educated to think that their own country is uniquely awful, its history unforgivable, and its traditions contemptible. They consider free speech dangerous and observable reality a matter of interpretation. They treat ordinary common sense like a biohazard.

The country of Shakespeare and the Magna Carta has lost its way. We’re not the same people who sent you taxes, then soldiers, then apologies, and eventually a steady stream of television actors. We are not quite unrecognisable yet, but the people who lead us are. The country that stood alone against fascism is run by people who think the man who led that effort was the real problem.

It started with Tony Blair – promising to carry us from a more-than-tolerable postwar settlement into a new century of “progress” and a plan to make that transition permanent. First under his watch and then under his apprentices, our institutions deformed from the inside, supervised by PR people first, politicians second, patriots never. A new order emerged, characterised by utter contempt for the nation that gave them birth, and a positive genius for the administrative management of decline.

They ran as different parties, naturally. Labour first, then Conservative, now Labour again. Not a liberal or a conservative or a democrat among them. Not working-class Labour either – a respectable tradition in its way.

We threw out one party and elected another. For a brief moment – Brexit, you might recall – it felt like the public will meant something. It didn’t. We had merely swapped one dinner party cohort for another. The guests became the hosts, then the guests again. The same dinner party continued. We were not invited.

Just this week, we learn that our banknotes will be redesigned on the grounds that historical figures are “polarising”. Churchill out, badgers in. Or is it beavers? We can be sure it won’t be dogs.

Labour councils have advised teachers that children’s drawings may constitute blasphemy under Islamic law. Female genital mutilation, we are told by our esteemed academics, is “culturally complex”; stigmatising it is the problem. Just recent examples. We have been wallowing in this humiliating cultural pigsty for twenty-five years.

For two decades, gangs of men raped thousands of girls in the towns of northern England. The authorities declined to intervene on the grounds that intervening might appear culturally insensitive. They put tact before the rape of children.

Last weekend, on the south bank of the Thames, crowds gathered to mourn Ayatollah Khamenei – a man whose militias were still killing their own people two months ago – with children waving placards bearing his face. A journalist who objected was surrounded by a mob and escorted away by police.

In London, this scarcely counts as unusual. You may think the mayor of New York is an eccentric choice for a city twenty-five years after 9/11. But we have Sadiq Khan – someone who’s spent a decade turning London into a city where you can be stabbed on the way to a vigil for the people who want to stab you, and still win re-election.

So, dear America, invade. Bring your boats and your helicopters, rain down missiles if you must. Smash through the diversity barriers with tanks, level the BBC and salt the earth.

At this rate, Britain will become the first country to erase itself in the name of progress. A country that gave the world Jane Austen will likely replace her on the ten-pound note with a fucking otter.

Invade, dear America. Rid us of the progressive aristocracy and return this country to its people. Do it for old times’ sake.

And when it’s all done, we’ll send you some tea – no taxes this time.

Yours faithfully,

The proud but exhausted people of Great Britain

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John Cleese is one of the very few celebrity activists I can get behind. Actually not “activist” – a word that now calls to mind trustafarians and murder junkies marching side by side through the world’s capitals for a recently deceased ayatollah.

Cleese is not an activist, then, but he is delightfully vocal and unfiltered on the absurdities of the moment. He’s become that rare thing in a stupid age – an influential voice of common sense in a world that treats such things as “problematic” and inflammatory.

Evidence of this comes from his recent posts on X, which point to the UK's unutterably stupid descent into an intellectual suburb of Islamabad.

Here’s a taste of what he’s been saying:

Cleese has probably retweeted things he shouldn’t. He’s 86 and posting in hurried disbelief at what’s happening to his country. The occasional loose cannonball is inevitable – and forgivable. I’d rather that than the bland, inoffensive slop that passes for conviction among people with more to lose and less to say.

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If Cleese were just another retired octogenarian, I suspect someone from the Starmer Stasi would have knocked on his door by now. They haven’t and probably won’t because he has an enormous online presence, or “reach” as marketers say – and reach, in this climate, is the only reliable protection.

Protection from what? Protection from saying what so many people think but have learned not to say: that Great Britain has been shat upon by a spiteful, technocratic, ideologically bamboozled collection of characters who belong in a Monty Python sketch, not the UK Parliament. That sort of thing.

Cleese has nothing left to prove. This is the man who co-wrote The Life of Brian and gave us Basil Fawlty. A man who has gifted the world more laughter than all humourless ideologues could ever bury under an avalanche of sanctimony.

More importantly for this discussion, he’s at an age where he has nothing to lose. Freed from the social calculus that keeps younger celebrities rigidly aligned to progressive orthodoxies, he’s able to post freely about extremism and the institutional cowardice that refuses to name it.

The response from the cultural establishment has been predictable: he’s gone mad; best not to engage; old white man howls into the wind. The instinct, as always, is to pathologise common sense as some kind of cognitive defect. “Is John Cleese OK?” – that patronising little question that implies mental illness while pretending concern.

He’s more than OK. He’s enjoying a second burst of the same irreverence that made him famous – which makes sense, because the target is essentially the same. When The Life of Brian was released in 1979, it was widely banned and picketed by people who apparently couldn’t tell the difference between Jesus and Brian. Cleese and the other Pythons, then in their thirties, skewered precisely the sort of people who most needed skewering – the pious and the pompous. The sort of people who today tell you to “educate yourself” and call you a racist for noticing things, in the belief that this wins the argument rather than advertises the absence of one.

Cleese has been thinking about this problem for a long time. Years ago, he gave a wonderfully clear explanation of the mentality of fanaticism – the habit of dividing the world into the pure and the impure, the enlightened and the damned.

The fanatics have only multiplied since. Like a lot of truly great comedy, the clip hits the target long after the first shot is fired. This was from a time when comedy and satire had a job to do and did it well.

What a pity, then, that modern comedians are so tiresomely quick to share their moral positioning on climate, trans rights, and every other urgent “moral emergency”, yet remain silent on the actual evils in our society. Today, satire is almost dead, not because so much of what surrounds us is beyond parody, but because the reputational costs are too high and the rewards for toeing the line too compelling.

What are the odds that at next week’s Oscars anyone will show solidarity with the massacred dissidents of Iran or call out the grotesque apologists for theocratic fascism? We won’t hear a word. Instead, we can expect the usual ejaculations about Gaza, Trump’s threat to democracy, and the existential horror of border enforcement. The causes that cost nothing, aimed at the enemies that are safe to have.

Not Cleese, though. He hasn’t been stupefied by fame and in his later years is using it for something useful – stirring things up and being a nuisance, or a gadfly, as I like to think of it.

Not that I agree with him on everything – of course I don’t. Agreement is not the point. Intellectual honesty and the courage to speak plainly are.

There’s something both funny and faintly melancholy about all this. The satirical tradition he helped build was supposed to be self-renewing – each generation finding the next sacred cows and roasting them like before. Instead, we’re watching an octogenarian do the job that a younger generation has decided is too risky to pursue, preferring instead to bore us with sermons about diversity and inclusion. Who the hell watches a comedian for that?

Cleese has remained true to his vocation. By the standards of the current moment, that makes him a dissident. Which probably says rather more about the moment than it does about him.

If you want to take the pulse of a culture, start with its comedy. Ours, with a few exceptions, is very unwell

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Gadfly Quotes

I’ve added a new section to The Gadfly – a place for some of my favourite quotations, aphorisms, quips and epigrams. These are the sort of lines you can dip into when you’d rather hear from people who have thought more deeply about the big questions than most of us.

If you have a favourite of your own, add it in the comments of the post below. I’ll update these posts with the best ones as the collection grows. Over time, I hope to build up a small library worth dipping into.

Here’s the first one.

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The Ayatollah’s obituary

It’s a good time to be in the hate business. You probably feel it too. If someone bothered to plot it on a graph, the line would look like one of those stock charts from a bubble economy: steady climb, minor dips, then a vertical. Ever since the internet became our second brain and social media the public vomitorium, the opportunity to despise people at scale has never been greater.

Let’s not pretend this is new, though. There have been far more dramatic surges of hatred in history. The 1930s were pretty full-on, albeit the media was less in-your-face. Back then, people had to go to a cinema to see a lunatic with a funny tache get very cross about things – and I don’t mean Charlie Chaplin but the other guy he was mocking.

Mocking tyrants is a good thing, by the way. Celebrating their downfall even better. Which is why the media obituaries for Ayatoll…

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They’re going to be more insufferable than usual, aren’t they? Greta will come out of hiding, and Jeremy Corbyn – who increasingly resembles the late Ayatollah Khomeini but with less charm – will pop up in TV interviews. He’ll declaim on the evils of regime change, waffle something about international law, and become indignant and evasive the moment anyone points out the nauseating hypocrisy – which they won’t because it’ll be on the BBC.

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I’m generally against criminalising stupidity. Nobody can be blamed for being born with a low IQ, or for having the misfortune to miss out on an education – although the latter isn’t strictly stupidity, and avoiding a Western university education is increasingly the smart move.

But some utterances are so stupid, so utterly devoid of logic and sense, so obviously designed to win applause rather than connect with intelligent life, that I find myself believing there must be a cost. A price must be paid. I’ll return to this.

Billie Eilish, I’m assured, is a talented singer. She’s the sort of person who can fill a stadium and make teenagers cry with a chord change. She’s also the sort of person who stands at the Grammys and tells the world that “nobody is illegal on stolen land” – and gets a standing ovation for it.

Let’s take a moment to unpack this. If all land is stolen – and it is repeatedly, by different groups throughout history – then the logical conclusion is either that everyone is illegal everywhere, or nobody is illegal anywhere. If the latter, then every country on earth should open its borders to every person who wants to come in.

Even a child can work out that this wouldn’t be practical. But Billie Eilish isn’t a child, she’s a celebrity – completely insulated from the real world and surrounded by sycophants and other moneyed morons who all think alike.

She doesn’t need to understand what the scripted line means. The only calculation she has to make is whether the phrase sounds compassionate. In her world, that’s the same thing as being compassionate – which is top-tier positioning for the status-hungry. The standing ovation confirms it.

Why does this matter? Who cares what singers and actors think?

Well, imagine someone tells Eilish that the Earth itself is stolen land. Stolen from whom, exactly? Doesn’t matter. Maybe the dinosaurs. The point is that by Friday, there’d be a #FreeEarth march in Los Angeles. A pin would be designed in the shape of a T. rex. Celebrities would wear it, and fans would follow suit. Within a month, Greta Thunberg would ditch the keffiyeh for a lizard-patterned onesie and release a spoken-word manifesto called Asteroid about the ancestral trauma of the Mesozoic Era. And anyone pointing out that the Earth belongs to nobody – or, more likely, to everyone – would be accused of being a planet supremacist.

And then someone would blame it on “Israel”. Then they all would.

Hollywood celebrities aren’t ideologues. They haven’t worked out a political philosophy or economic framework. They’re not wrestling with Marxist dialectics or decolonial theory. They’re airheads and useful idiots who’ve spotted a status opportunity and grabbed it. The oppressor/oppressed framework is the most efficient virtue-signalling machine ever invented. You don’t need to understand anything. You just need to know who’s the victim and who’s the villain – and then declare that you’re on the right side of history.

Hollywood is the perfect fit because these are people who tell stories about goodies and baddies for a living. This is what makes them so dangerous. They genuinely believe life is this simple and that they are at the centre of it. Moral narcissists are everywhere, but Hollywood moral narcissists really are everywhere – on every screen, in every feed, telling young people that Israel is evil and brown people are oppressed. There’s no further context or nuance. No complexity. Just a story that gets told and retold, deformed and eventually borrowed by sadists and fanatics for moral cover.

At the Golden Globes, a reporter asked Bill Maher why he wasn’t wearing a “Be Good” pin – a tribute to Renee Good. Half the celebrities in the room were already adorned. Maher’s answer:

“It was a terrible thing that happened. And if they didn’t act like such thugs, it wouldn’t have had to happen. But I don’t need to wear a pin about it.”

Later on his show, he reiterated the point:

“I hope I didn’t spoil the perfect record of pins and ribbons solving the world’s problems. You can’t name a problem – from guns to AIDS to bullying to breast cancer – that still exists after people wore a ribbon for it. Except all of them. You fucking posers.”

Few celebrities puncture the hypocrisy of their own tribe as effectively as Maher. He understands that pins and ribbons aren’t political statements but accessories. They signal membership of a very exclusive club – the club of People Who Care™. Or, more accurately, the club of people who need everyone to know they care.

Which is why the silence on Iran is so damning. The system reveals itself as one that isn’t designed to pick up every genuine cause, only the safe ones. While Billie Eilish rehearses lines about stolen land, the Islamic Republic is massacring its own people by the tens of thousands – the majority of them killed on two days, shot by the Revolutionary Guard on direct orders from Khamenei. Most of the dead were under 30. The government cut the internet to hide it while doctors smuggled footage out via Starlink.

Where’s the pin for this? The hashtag? Where’s Mark Ruffalo?

Nobody’s surprised at any of this because Iran doesn’t fit the template. The oppressor is an Islamic theocracy, not a Western democracy. Criticising Islam is career suicide in Hollywood. So they simply don’t see it. Their radar only picks up signals that come pre-packaged for virtue signalling, and Iran isn’t one of them.

“Our voices really do matter”, said Eilish at the end of her speech. This is true but not in the way she thinks. Celebrities are so convinced that good intentions are the same thing as good outcomes that thinking becomes optional. Their young and unworldly audiences lap it up all the same.

Which brings me back to the cost. The price that must be paid.

It’s tempting to indulge the fantasy of chartering an A380 and flying Hollywood royalty immediately to Tehran to discover the true cost of speaking out for freedom.

But the real cost of moral narcissism ought to be much simpler than that. Holding luxury beliefs should become hugely embarrassing – stigmatised, even. Delivering scripted opinions about Gaza while ignoring Iranian clerical fascism should be career-terminating. Not because some authority decrees it, but because enough people have enough moral clarity to see the hypocrisy for what it is – a game for status junkies. They’ll stop watching the films and streaming the music because it’s all just a bit gross.

And only then, when the status calculation flips, when performance stops paying, will Hollywood’s moral narcissists pause and wonder whether any of it was ever real.

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