Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage has a clear message for “woke celebrities” in the wake of the left’s crushing defeat in the British elections: don’t give up the day job, and start speaking to people outside the London bubble.
“Do you have any last thoughts for Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan, other celebrities, Lily Allen, the ones who were all trying to stop Brexit happening who’ve woken up today to a rather bad morning?” Farage was asked by Good Morning Britain host Piers Morgan the day after the election.
“Yeah, get back to acting, get back to singing — oh, and do yourself a favour, go outside the M25, and there you’ll find people with very different views to you,” he said, referring to the motorway that is often used in political conversation as something of a metaphorical boundary between the country’s hyper-diverse, cosmopolitan capital and the wider country.
My message to woke celebrities:
Get back to acting, get back to singing and go outside the M25.
You will find people have very different views to yours.
— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) December 15, 2019
Hugh Grant, best known for upper-middle-class rom-com roles intended to come across as lovably bumbling on-screen, and for an infamous “lewd conduct in a public place” conviction off-screen, is a committed anti-Brexiteer, and sought to leverage his celebrity to help a number of anti-Brexit candidates win seats in the House of Commons — none of whom were successfully elected.
Steve Coogan, whose ‘Alan Partridge’ character is a British favourite — and perhaps rather more popular than the man who plays him — also waded into the campaign, using his most famous creation as a vehicle to take a patronising swipe at Brexit voters.
“Alan Partridge is an ill-informed and ignorant [sic], and therefore he’s a Conservative and a Brexiteer, so there you go,” he told Channel 4 presenter Cathy Newman — of “so you’re saying” fame — to appreciative laughter.
“I think the reason the Tories don’t invest as much in education is because they depend on a certain level of ignorance for their support,” he added smugly.
I wrote in @theipaper yesterday: “Celebrities who parade their horror at not getting their way don’t seem to realise that they’re confirming the decision people took to shake things up.” https://t.co/LrG6bO25py
Today Steve Coogan demonstrates exactly that: pic.twitter.com/BKlkVWHMQr— Mark Wallace (@wallaceme) December 11, 2019
Singer and open border enthusiast Lily Allen, meanwhile, may have taken Labour’s loss hardest of all.
As the results of the British election became clear, her Twitter feed filled with distraught posts such as “Vote for your kids to die with no healthcare and less brown ppl but the joke is capitalism needs cheap foreign workers to exploit so will NEVER reduce immigration so jokes on u” and “I think that racism and misogyny runs so deep in this country and that Boris won because of his attitude towards those things and not in spite of them.”
Allen has, following the inevitable backlash, deleted her Twitter account, “because I really believe that these platforms have given a voice to the far right, and they use them to spread disinformation and lies… If they didn’t exist we wouldn’t be here.”
The millionaire issued this statement about the microblogging platform, which despite her characterisation skews heavily to the liberal left both in terms of its leadership and user base, on Instagram — another giant social media platform.
Labour’s Jess Phillips Sides With Lily Allen in Defending Muslim Rape Gangs https://t.co/zIfLVEipjk
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 8, 2018
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