The Social World

Tag: Britain

  • As an American Anglophile, I can’t defend Britain

    For much of my career, beginning as a foreign adviser to the U.S. Congress, I have proudly stood as one of America’s strongest advocates for Britain. 

    I have defended her history, her institutions and her role as the original home of liberty. 

    I have championed the UK in forums throughout the US and in publications across the globe, reminding audiences that our shared values of liberty and democracy, bequeathed by our mother, England, form the bedrock of transatlantic strength. 

    Today, for the first time, I find Britain indefensible. The affection and historical respect remains. The confidence is gone.  

    Britain now prosecutes her own citizens not for violence or treason but for words. Lucy Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in prison for a tweet in the wake of the Southport tragedy; she served ten. 

    Her crime was expression, harsh perhaps but still speech. Graham Linehan, the award‑winning creator of Father Ted, was arrested at Heathrow by armed officers with guns for online comments defending women’s spaces. Arrested, by police carrying weapons, for his opinions. 

    This is the country that once gave the world John Stuart Mill.  

    Such cases expose what Britain has become: a two‑tier system of justice. Those branded far‑right, nationalist or “Islamophobic” are prosecuted with zeal. Those spreading incendiary rhetoric from Islamist or minority factions are met with indulgence. The 2024 riots exposed the imbalance in plain sight. Swift punishment for those the state distrusts. Hesitation and leniency for those it fears. Law as weapon, not protection.  

    This has not happened by accident. Britain’s institutions have been captured. Its police, judiciary and permanent bureaucracy answer less to the people than to a class of activists embedded at the top. 

    Leading them is a man who knows the law not as a shield for the people but as a sword for ideology: Keir Starmer. Starmer did not merely elevate activist lawyers to high office. He is one. He has built his career knowing how to bend legal frameworks into blunt instruments. Now in Downing Street he deploys those instruments against the liberties Britain once bequeathed the world.  

    A particularly chilling example lies in the push to enshrine a definition of “Islamophobia.” What is presented as tolerance is in practice a new blasphemy law, criminalizing criticism of religion and culture whenever it offends official sensitivities. The land that abolished the Star Chamber is now flirting with prosecuting thought crimes.  

    The suspicion of national pride runs just as deep. During the 2024 riots, Starmer cautioned against using the St George’s Cross or the Union Jack “divisively.” To ordinary Britons these flags are symbols of unity and heritage. To their government they are red flags of extremism. 

    Meanwhile, foreign flags fly freely across London without question. The message is unmistakable: pride in your own country is suspect. Allegiance to any other is acceptable.  

    Immigration policy tells the same story. Labour boasts of progress, yet more than 32,000 asylum seekers remain in taxpayer‑funded hotels at a cost of £2.1 billion a year. Whole communities are expected to accept disruption without complaint, and if they speak out they are branded intolerant. Concerns about security or cohesion are brushed aside as if no decent Briton could possibly hold them.  

    From abroad the shift is impossible to ignore. Elon Musk has called Britain’s censorship Soviet‑style. JD Vance has condemned its crackdown on speech. The US State Department now lists Britain as a country presenting significant risks to free expression. I never imagined America would place Britain alongside nations that treat liberty as a nuisance. That day has come.  

    For those of us who have long defended Britain, it is heartbreaking. This is the country whose strong institutions enabled America’s own rise and whose commitment to liberty inspired ours. Yet under its current leadership Britain has stumbled into repression, constraint and fear, where ordinary citizens look over their shoulders before speaking.  

    And still there is a chance for recovery. A counter‑movement exists. Figures such as Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick, Ben Habib and the Reform UK party speak plainly about borders, free speech and sovereignty. They refuse to accept that patriotism is extremism or that questioning official orthodoxy is hate. For this they are demonized by the governing elite, but for this they are listened to by ordinary citizens who have had enough and are reasserting their national pride as manifested in the tidal wave of Union and St. George flags that have flooded cities throughout the UK through efforts such as Operation Raise the Colors. 

    Britain must decide. It can continue down its present course, where speech is policed, justice is politicised and Starmer’s legal class governs not on behalf of the nation but against it. Or it can remember its own inheritance, trusting its people and restoring freedom as the organizing principle of national life.  

    The world does not need a Britain that jails her patriots. It needs the Britain that once taught us all to be free.

  • Why Graham Linehan’s arrest is a turning point

    Why Graham Linehan’s arrest is a turning point

    The hoo-ha in Britain over free speech being trampled on has always seemed exaggerated. I earn my living through voicing my opinions, and not once have I ever felt unable to say exactly what I think – especially when that’s controversial or offends large numbers of people.

    I am, of course, well aware that some people have had a very different experience – such as the comedy writer Graham Linehan, creator of Father Ted, who has robustly pointed out that biology means that men who identify as women are, nonetheless, still men. For that, his career was effectively ended in an industry that has long been in thrall to trans and other ideologies.

    But I have bridled at some of the supposed examples of free speech being destroyed. I am not one of those, for example, who believes Lucy Connolly is some sort of hero. Her social media post in the wake of the Southport murders last summer saying that hotels with asylum seekers should be set on fire was, to my mind, not merely revolting but incitement. Had it been merely revolting – something with which most decent people were horrified by – then that would be something for which she should have been taken to task, but not by the criminal justice system. Her post crossed a line, however.

    But there are moments when the penny drops and you realize you are wrong. Today has provided one of those moments. When Linehan returned from the United States yesterday, where he moved to be able to work, he was promptly arrested at Heathrow by five armed police officers. What alleged crime must he have been suspected of to be met by a show of such force? Murder? Terrorism? Armed robbery?

    None of those. He was arrested, he says in a Substack he posted earlier today, because of three tweets he had posted.

    Linehan’s tweets are nothing like Lucy Connolly’s. They are merely expressions of his view of trans ideology, albeit strongly worded, in his (entirely legitimate) style. In one, he posted a picture of what seems be a trans rights demonstration, with his caption: “A photo you can smell.” Another reads: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F— em.” And the third says: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

    You might not like his tone. You might find his attitude confrontational. Trans people will doubtless find the posts offensive. So what? There is no law against giving offense.

    Except that appears no longer to be true. The Metropolitan Police has confirmed that Linehan was held “in relation to posts on X.” “The man in his 50s was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence,” a spokesman said.

    Criminality is evolving every day in this sphere. Increasingly, giving offense is being taken by the police and the Crown Prosecution Service as prima facie evidence of criminality. The other side of this coin is that taking offense is seen as legitimate grounds for a complaint. Presumably someone made a complaint to the police over these tweets – unless, and this is not beyond the realms of possibility, the police have officers who spend their days trawling the internet looking for posts that offend what they consider to be good taste. Is that really a good use of police time?

    Trust in the police is at an all-time low. In October 2024, 52 percent of adults told YouGov that they had no confidence in the police to tackle crime, compared to 39 percent in October 2019. What the police don’t now do – tackle crime – is just one aspect of the collapse in trust. Allied to that is what the police do now do – such as arresting people over social media posts which merely give offense to someone. It’s of a piece with what is seen on the regular hate marches, where they stand and watch when there are calls for the murder of Jews (such as the widespread “globalize the intifada”), but only spring into action when a counter-demonstrator turns up, saying that they are likely to provoke a breach of the peace.

    What we are seeing is the congruence of two dangerous developments. First, is the idea that giving offense is something which should be banned. The government’s current move towards adopting a definition of Islamophobia is part of this, and has rightly been labelled by Fiyaz Mughal, the founder of Muslim anti-prejudice group TellMAMA, as introducing a blasphemy law by the back door. Similarly, the onward march of the trans ideologues may have been stopped in its tracks by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the definition of “woman,” but the ideology has already taken hold of many institutions and spaces.

    Which leads to the second development – the police’s capture by this and other “woke” ideologies. Linehan describes how in his police interview a police officer mentioned trans people: “I asked him what he meant by the phrase. ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’ I said: ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.’ He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.”

    This is the nub of it. The police, supposed guardians of the law, have become players in the activists’ capture of the institutions. It is not that they are no longer concerned with crime, but that they are redefining what crime is. It is terrible that Linehan should have had to go through this. But if it wakes more of us up to what is happening in Britain, his arrest will have served our country well.

  • Where did it all go so wrong for Britain?

    If I had to summarize, in a word, the mood of Britain in 2025, I’d probably plump for fraught. It’s not just the protests against illegal migrants in hotels, or the apparent collapse of the political parties which have governed us for so long, or the anger for and against free speech.

    There is something in the air that I can’t quite recall having sniffed before, the kind of crackle that might be quite exciting or intriguing if you were standing a little bit further back from it, flicking through the pages of a history book, maybe. But it’s rather different to live through it.

    People like me, and probably you over in America, were socialized in a more stable and reliable world, where everyone and everything muddled along. So we find it very hard to adjust to the return of history with a capital H.

    That lost age on the domestic front in Britain, which lasted from about the end of the miners’ strike in 1985 up to the subprime crunch of 2008, was the era in which we assured ourselves that “things will sort themselves out.” We told ourselves that things would probably turn out fine; there was nothing much you can do about it, after all, so best just to potter along. No one wanted to run about squawking like Chicken Licken, who thought the sky was falling in.

    This complacency was justified, because often – in that curious interregnum, which we mistook for how things were just going to be from now on – things often did sort themselves out, or at least they appeared to.

    How quaint Britain’s big worries of the 1990s now seem

    How quaint Britain’s big worries of the 1990s now seem! Let’s look back thirty years to the big news stories of 1995. Nick Leeson crashed the stately old Barings Bank, a soccer player kung fu kicked a fan at Selhurst Park stadium, pubs stayed open for the first time on Sunday afternoons, and Princess Diana granted TV interviews. Ethnic strife and economic murk were forgotten, things of the past. It’s dizzying to realize that this was the country, presided over by John Major’s slightly hapless Conservative Government, that Tony Blair’s 1997 slogan “things could only get better” came from.

    True, it was often the boring people during boring times who led us to where we are now. The subsequent first term of Tony Blair was also colossally dull, at least on the home front. But under that screen of fog, it ripped up and tore apart centuries of vital constitutional structure. We looked away, to Big Brother and Eminem as much that we rested so blithely upon was smashed up, boringly. Net migration, for example, rose from 48,000 in 1997 to 273,000 in 2007, reflecting the cumulative impact of incredibly tedious policies that nobody looked at. Were the results of that ever likely to just sort themselves out?

    Where are we now? The years since 2008 have been ever more rancorous and turbulent. It’s been tempting to cling on to our illusions, and imagine we will somehow drift back to the age of security. Perhaps we’re imagining it all – after all, we still live (mostly) uneventful lives in an affluent, if retrenching, society.

    But I fear we are just at the start of a return of ferments and upheavals, with our foundations seriously weakened. World politics is slipping back to the age of empires, with the big difference that this time we haven’t got one. We are back in the world of Shakespeare’s history cycles; endless battles, reverses, false hopes, the strange alliances of sworn enemies. It rumbles on and on and on, with the little people tossed about in the tides, grabbing whatever driftwoods of solace that they can.

    And that is not unusual. Crack open any history book. It’s the natural state of things.

    When Keir Starmer’s Labour got in last year, we had a good old laugh at clownish figures like the liberal journalist Otto English, who tweeted tweely that the “quiet” was going to be such a refreshing change. “For the first time in many of our lives, actually Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability,” said the veteran newsman Andrew Marr on Question Time. He might as well have donned a flashing neon sign reading HOSTAGE TO FORTUNE.

    But. If we are feeling honest, and generous – and I do have occasional twinges of both – those of us of the same generation as such silly people can understand the impulse, their longing to believe in the return of the apparent stillness of our young adulthood (even if it was at least partly illusory).

    Now even Tory-in-name-only Lord Finkelstein is admitting that he’s had his doubts all along, writing in the London Times of the simmering atmosphere of 2025. “People’s failure to live and let live baffles me,” he says. On the immediate level, that sentence terrifies me; that someone so divorced from the basic reality of human beings could have been attached to the Conservative Party. But I understand too, because I also come from that world and that lost “family of man, Kumbaya, it’ll be fine” age.

    Believing what is convenient or reassuring rather than what’s true is great, so long as you can afford it. Continuing with it when you can’t is disastrous. For all we know, the Britain of 2025 may look like a paradise to the Britons of 2055. And that’s the scariest thing.

  • J.D. Vance: proconsul to Britain?

    Vice President J.D. Vance’s family vacation in Britain was disrupted by protesters who insisted that he was not welcome in the country. In the Cotswolds, an area northwest of Oxford and the British equivalent of Martha’s Vineyard, ultraliberal white protesters huddled together on August 12 to make their meager numbers look large for the cameras, wielding signs bearing such slogans as “End Genocide!” and “Stop Fascists!” One participant quoted by the Guardian explained: “I’m most worried about his environmental policies. They risk eliminating the whole of humanity, all the creatures on the Earth.” 

    Coming the same week that President Donald Trump asserted greater control over Washington, DC, by taking over the city’s law enforcement, the Vance visit highlighted the tensions between local democratic rule and its frequent deviation from the public good. In both instances, the American leaders are saving localities from too much self-rule run amok.

    Of course, the British government – despite being a Labour ministry – encouraged the Vance visit, including his sojourn in the Cotswolds. As with the “Nixon to China” playbook, it is Labour politicians who have traditionally played the role of transatlantic mediators because they are trusted to protect the national interest, as opposed to the often-slavish Tories. Nor did the gentle farmers of the Cotswolds as a whole necessarily disagree with the visit. The village where Vance stayed belongs to a legislative district held by Labour, but the region’s two other districts are held by a Conservative and a Liberal Democrat. It is fair to say that the median voter in the Cotswolds probably took the visit to be an acceptable exercise of diplomatic bridge-building by the central government.

    Rather, the real debate over Vance’s visit, and the reaction to it, was to do with who speaks for the Cotswolds in a longer-term, intergenerational sense. Like Trump’s check on DC’s home rule, Vance’s return to the ancestral mother country less as a visitor than as an envoy of Anglo civilization is a check on the home rule of a wobbling British nation. That, more than anything else, is why the leftist luminaries of British cultural destruction took to the grassy commons with their signboards and saucepans.

    The Cotswolds region contains much of what is important in British history. I have walked over its excavated Roman settlements and through the remains of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, which resisted Viking control. The region also played a central role in the development of the English ecclesiastical and constitutional traditions, which were the basis of American colonial success. It played host to the first battle of the civil war between Charles I and Parliament (Powick Bridge, in 1642), as well as the last (Stow-on-the-Wold, in 1646). 

    In microcosm, the Cotswolds is the British civilization that the Americans have been called upon to rescue time and again. The American rebellion against George III was heralded by many English Whigs as a welcome tonic for their decaying democracy, where the voting franchise had shrunk to a mere 15 percent of adult males. The “special relationship” between the two countries based on their common culture and history emerged in the Victorian era when the US offered critical support to the liberal imperialism of the British empire. Britain, for its part, chose not to interfere with America’s Civil War. Winston Churchill’s famous Dunkirk speech of 1940 – looking forward to the moment when “the New World with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old” – was merely reprising an old theme.

    Vance’s rescue mission began with some fishing alongside the British foreign secretary and then moved through several pubs before decamping to Scotland. When a country, like a city, has lost its way, its external guarantor may be called upon to impose home rule. Like the long-suffering residents of DC, the British people will welcome their liberation and rescue.

  • Britain’s foreign secretary faces fine for fishing without a license

    What people on the other side of the pond call “Brand Britain” has taken something of a knock in recent years – especially in the United States, which the British often still view as an errant son. With unnerving speed Britain’s reputation has collapsed stateside, especially among the political right, from the country of Brideshead Revisited to a grotty Airstrip One. The symbol of the new Britain in the eyes of many Americans are the ubiquitous licenses (or, in the argot of a London copper, “loicenses”) that citizens seem to need for everything – including, most notoriously, owning a TV.

    Now even the Foreign Secretary has been caught without a loicense. On Friday David Lammy went fishing with the now-Vice President J.D. Vance, who is here for an extended visit, on the grounds of Chevening – the grace-and-favor country house granted to the incumbent Foreign Secretary. But there was a snag. It turns out that Mr. Lammy did not have a rod license – and fishing without one can incur a fine of up to £2,500 ($3,400). Not ideal for a country that’s looking to burnish its libertarian bona fides.

    Earlier this week, the State Department warned that the human rights situation in the UK had “worsened” amid some heavy-handed enforcement of the country’s laws on so-called hate speech. And last year the then-Senator J.D. Vance joked that the UK was the “first Islamist country with nuclear weapons.”

    British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has been keen to curry favor with the 47th President and so is determined to shake off the litigious image. He’s been saying all sorts of Whig, Macaulay-ite things about our national story that went out of style in the UK long ago. Magna Carta, the “Mother of Parliaments,” all the rest of it. All calculated to soothe the feelings of a stately fellow of the Heritage Foundation, for whom England is still the birthplace of constitutional government. “We have had free speech for a long time so, er, we’re very proud of that,” Starmer told reporters during Trump’s visit to Scotland last month.

    But this stratagem may have just hit a bump. Lammy has now referred himself to the Environment Agency, an independent watchdog that handles such matters. An act of nobility on a level with the heroes of the English Civil War, to be sure.

  • Essex-boy Elegy: J.D. Vance meets the Bosh man

    Vice President Vance is currently receiving visitors at an 18th-century Georgian manor in the Cotswolds, an implausibly quaint patch of the English countryside. Petitioners so far have included James Orr, the Cambridge academic and right-wing activist, Robert Jenrick, likely the next leader of Britain’s Tories, and Nigel Farage, likely the next UK Prime Minister.

    Also on the list was one Thomas Skinner, a gregarious wide boy from East London turned e-celebrity turned patriotic influencer. After a stint as a pillow and mattress merchant Skinner, 34, found fame as a contestant on the 15th series of the British version of The Apprentice. In 2022 he began posting videos on social media of himself gobbling down steaming platters of traditional English fare – pie, mash, bacon, beans, sausage, chips (fries), fried eggs, fried bread, black pudding – while extolling the virtues of family and hard work. Each homily would end with Skinner’s trademark catchphrase: “BOSH.”

    Skinner’s politics began to emerge. “I love Trump, I think he is brilliant, that’s my opinion. I think it’s good he is back in charge, it will be good for the UK economy,” he said in late 2024. Mayor Sadiq Khan had “ruined” London and militant eco-protesters were “ruining people’s lives.” Orr, who has emerged as a leading theorist of a newly-galvanized British right, took notice. Had they finally found their own Trump – or at the very least their own Archie Bunker? In June Skinner delivered a speech at Now and England, a conference organized by Orr, where he spoke of “kids being taught to be ashamed of their own flag.” The Vice President watched.

    Now the two netizens meet at last. Vance, a longtime online admirer, invited Skinner over for beers and a barbecue. Skinner relayed his experience with his usual brio:

    When the Vice President of the USA invites ya for a BBQ a beers, you say yes. Unreal night with JD and his friends n family. He was a proper gent. Lots of laughs and some fantastic food. A brilliant night, one to tell the grand kids about mate. Bosh❤️

    Here is a pic of Me and Vice President @JDVance towards the end of the night after a few beers 🍻 I’m overdressed in my suit, but when the VP invites you to a BBQ, you don’t risk turning up in shorts an flip-flops 😂 Cracking night in the beautiful English countryside with JD, his friends and family. Once in a lifetime. Bosh ❤️🇬🇧🇺🇸

    The encounter is another sign of the chaotic merger that’s being carried out between politics and the online world. Is Skinner a meme, or a politician? It’s increasingly difficult to disentangle the two.

  • The UK censorship files: Jim Jordan’s crusade against Britain

    The British Empire may be gone, but there is one area where the UK has not lost its global ambitions: online censorship. The latest vehicle is the Online Safety Act (OSA), a behemoth internet regulation law whose vast provisions are steadily coming into force – and increasingly drawing the ire of the Trump administration as it starts to impact US tech firms. 

    Under the OSA, “Britain has the power to shut down any platform” that breaks its content regulation rules, boasts secretary of state for technology Peter Kyle. The latest stage of its implementation began last week with new mandatory age-verification measures for social media platforms. 

    The Act is already curtailing what can be read online in the UK. Though the OSA was passed back in 2023 by the Conservatives, the Labour government has taken it up the internet “regulation” crusade with gusto. The rhetorical strategy is to claim that the law is unobjectionable since it is merely about restricting minors’ access to pornography and other “harmful” content – “think of the children”. But it all comes across as rather hysterical. In an extraordinary intervention this week, when the populist Reform Party’s Nigel Farage pledged to repeal the law, Kyle labelled him – and anyone else that’s opposed to it – as being on the side of child predators like Jimmy Savile.

    In reality, there are many valid criticisms to be made of this wildly overbearing law. Small online forums dedicated niche interests, for instance, including fixed-gear cycling and hamsters, have been forced to close due to heavy compliance costs. Many tech companies likewise view it as suffocating. Another major sticking pointis its stringent regulations on AI – a vital emerging field in which the UK risks being left in the dust.

    Most egregious, though, is the OSA’s impact on free speech. Since the new rules came into force, platforms have been forced to censor political speech that paints the British government in a bad light. This includes footage of recent anti-asylum protests, and even speeches in Parliament and court transcripts about the rape gangs scandal. This latter is particularly galling: this was horrific abuse that the British state abjectly failed to protect these children from – and now speech about it is being censored in the name of child safeguarding.

    The bigger problem, for Kyle and the British government, is how the OSA and their censorship cheerleading will play out in the eyes of America. The Trump administration is already unhappy with the state of free expression in Britain.

    A good example of the culture clash came this week, with Jim Jordan, a Trump ally, free-speech advocate and chair of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. Jordan will meet Peter Kyle himself, where he is expected raise concerns about free speech. As part of his UK visit, Jordan has viewed documents produced by the Committee that seem to show that the UK government attempted to censor online content during the riots that swept the country last summer. Posting them on X as ‘THE UK CENSORSHIP FILES’, he has accused the British government, including Kyle and Keir Starmer, of “trying to censor criticism of itself,” and clamping down on “narratives” wounding to the British state – like claims of “two-tier justice”. Here’s hoping that Peter Kyle will refrain from alleging that Jordan is “on the side of predators” for his free-speech advocacy.

    While freedom-loving Brits are grateful that their American cousins are helping to safeguard free speech, there is also the question of how the OSA will impact Americans’ own jealously-guarded First Amendment rights. If Washington, DC, looks askance at censorship laws the UK, it’s even less pleased about the British state’s attempts to expand the scope of that regulation across the Atlantic to US websites and tech firms. Back in May, the State Department fired a warning shot, mooting visa bans for foreign officials found to have censored “protected expression in the United States”. US free-speech concerns are also expected to feature in any forthcoming trade deal. Both Trump, in his recent visit, and JD Vance, in the Oval Office back in February, have publicly needled Keir Starmer over the issue.

    The key question is whether America is happy to allow a few hundred Whitehall bureaucrats to bring its tech titans to heel. With the US celebrating 250 years of independence next year, there are many free-speech warriors stateside who would sooner tell Ofcom, Britain’s broadcast regulator, where to get off.

    Prominent among the minutemen is Preston Byrne, an Anglo-American lawyer and free speech activist who also works with the Adam Smith Institute, a British free-market think tank. Byrne has already tangled with Ofcom over the OSA, following enforcement letters it sent to US websites including Gab and Kiwi Farms earlier this year. These sites, however, were comparatively small fry. Ofcom has now sent similar letters to Reddit and Rumble, and in response, Byrne is set to bring a case against Ofcom in the US federal courts.

    For a notice to be served by a foreign power against a US company, typically it would have to go through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) to be valid. But that doesn’t seem to be the case for these notices: indeed, if Ofcom had gone through the MLAT, Byrne believes that the State Department and the Department of Justice would not be minded to abide by them. So the letters, for all they threaten these companies with fines or worse, are in fact legally dubious. “Ofcom,” Byrne tells me, “is the international equivalent of a stalker-y ex – they’ve been told to stop, it’s unlawful for them to continue, and now we need the courts to intervene.”

    Just how much more will this battle heat up? What’s clear is that British officialdom’s zeal for online regulation is setting it on a collision course with a resurgent and energetic US free-speech lobby. Yet with trade talks looming, such escalation would surely be a grave mistake. Britain does not rule the world anymore. If London wakes up the “screaming Eagle”, Byrne says, “they’re not gonna like the results”.

  • Gillian Anderson: Ice Queen

    Imagine, for a moment, that a respected middle-aged British male character actor – Jason Isaacs, let’s say – had been cast in the lead role of a sex therapist in a popular, Gen Z-focused Netflix series, called something like Love Lessons. Then imagine that Isaacs had become seemingly so obsessed with blurring the lines between himself and his character that he had not only edited a book about men’s sexual fantasies, anonymously including one of his own in there, too, but had begun a secondary career appearing on podcasts in which he encouraged men to freely discuss their peccadilloes and penchants, however taboo they might seem.

    It would, of course, never happen – not even for a man as likable as Isaacs. Yet something very similar has taken place with his Salt Path and Sex Education co-star Gillian Anderson, a woman who seems to have turned into her Sex Education character Jean Milburn, only with added froideur and grandeur. (Her Instagram profile, where she boasts 3.5 million followers, describes her as “Actor. Author. Activist. Dog Mum.”) When Anderson recently appeared on Davina McCall’s podcast Begin Again, the blurb gushed that “this episode is about giving yourself permission to explore your wildest fantasies, the power of desire and the importance of asking what you truly WANT – not only in the bedroom but in LIFE!”

    The territory of mom-fluencer of a certain age is hardly unknown, and Anderson cannot be blamed for embracing extra-curricular activities. Her most recent book, 2024’s Want, was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, and she has segued smoothly into a career that has encompassed television, film and theatre, as well, now, as that of author. (We will draw a tactful veil over the trio of fantasy novels, The Earthend Saga, that she co-authored, or at least put her lucrative name to, between 2014 and 2016.) She is one of the best-known actresses in Britain, thanks to her star-making role in The X Files and her subsequent high profile, and remains a sought-after A-list guest at any party or soirée. So why, then, is Gillian Anderson so difficult to warm to?

    Most actors try and give an impression of warmth and likability in press interviews and in public appearances on things like The Graham Norton Show. Even if, privately, they detest everyone around them and consider themselves part of a rarified species, they have been given extensive media training to make themselves seem down-to-earth and accessible. Anderson, however, has gone entirely the other way. If ever she is compelled to appear on a chat show, she wears an air of regal hauteur that suggests that she regards the whole affair as deeply beneath her, and carries this sense of superiority into interviews. Journalists use the words “frosty” or “steely” in profiles about her; a polite way of describing someone who clearly has little interest in ingratiating herself with those who she finds beneath her.

    Why is Gillian Anderson so difficult to warm to?

     If Anderson’s work was consistently extraordinary, she might be forgiven much of this aloofness. Many of the greatest actors in history could not be described as “nice”, from Marlene Dietrich to Tommy Lee Jones. Anderson would also probably argue that it is a misogynistic canard that she should have to be seen as warm and fuzzy because she is a woman. She might, of course, be right, but the difficulty is that she is a variable screen talent, to say the least.

    Anderson was indeed magnificent in Terence Davies’s little-seen Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth, and gave very fine performances indeed in both the BBC’s adaptation of Bleak House and the serial killer drama The Fall, which both made use of her icy beauty and cool intelligence. But she was devastatingly bad as Margaret Thatcher in the fourth series of The Crown, pitching her performance just this side of pantomime in an apparent attempt to convince viewers that she, herself, was nothing like this dreadful woman that she was playing, and that she didn’t share an iota of her politics or thoroughly reprehensible views.

    By the time that Anderson popped up in Sex Education, an enjoyable if silly show that overstayed its welcome, it was clear that she had come to regard herself as a Great British Institution; ironic, really, for a woman born in Chicago and who rose to prominence playing American characters. So it is amusing that her most recent performance may yet turn out to be one of her most controversial.

    Anderson and Isaacs played Raynor and Moth Winn, the beleaguered protagonists of The Salt Path, in the successful film adaptation of the book, which has since run into trouble after the revelations that Winn had been more than a little economical with the actualité. Ironically, Anderson had already inadvertently conveyed her own misgivings about Winn, saying in an interview that: “I was surprised at how guarded she was…it was interesting to encounter a certain steeliness.” Or, indeed, a fear that being lifted to another level of recognition altogether would lead to her subsequent exposure by the British newspaper the Observer.

    Anderson has not commented publicly on the scandal, and it is unlikely that she will be prepared to do so until it is settled one way or the other. Yet were she to break her silence, and admit that she felt annoyed, even betrayed, by the undeniably embarrassing situation, it would be a rare chink in the armor of this ice queen, sex therapist and, it would appear, all-round Renaissance woman. Just a tinge of vulnerability, you cannot help thinking, would make the Magnificent Anderson that bit more human, and therefore likable. Whether it will ever happen, however, is a mystery worthy of Agent Scully’s investigative powers.