Laurence Fox – Blood and Porridge

© Maverick / Warner Bros.

September 2025 reminds me of the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette. The song’s lyrics contain many examples of things that are ironic, for example, “An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day,” or “a free ride when you’ve already paid”, or “ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife.” Although, as the comedian Ed Byrne has pointed out, some of the situations mentioned in the song aren’t actually ironic. “A traffic jam when you’re already late,” for example. As Byrne observed, that’s really only ironic if you’re a city planner.

Anyway, should Alanis Morissette ever write a sequel to Ironic, the month that has just passed should provide her with more than enough material. To me, it’s the most ironic month I’ve ever experienced. Here are a few reasons why I think so.

[Incidentally, this blog-entry contains references to American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Please note that it’s possible to hold two opinions about Kirk at the same time, though many people out there are unable – or unwilling – to accept this.

Firstly, you can be horrified by Kirk’s murder, excoriate the fact that it happened while he was on a university campus exercising his right to free speech, and feel sorry for his young family. Secondly and simultaneously, you can detest many of the things that came out of his mouth. Things about black people. (“Happening all the time in urban America, prowling blacks go around for fun to… target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.”) About women. (“Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge… And most importantly, I can’t wait to go to a Taylor Kelce concert… You’ve got to change your name. If not, you don’t really mean it.”) About Islam. (“Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”) About trans-people. (“We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.”). And so on. Also, you can be dismayed by the fact he made himself very wealthy by saying such things.]

September 10^th

Charlie Kirk once said this of American gun ownership and the attendant, heavy toll of American gun-related deaths (16,576 in 2124, excluding suicides). “You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel… I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Today, while speaking at Utah Valley University, Kirk was shot dead by an American citizen, using a gun, which it was his God-given right to own under the Second Amendment. How tragically ironic and tragically American.

September 11^th

UK prime minister Keir Starmer sacked Peter Mandelson from his job as British ambassador to the USA. This was on account of Mandelson being an old friend of the late millionaire paedophile and human-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson had even waxed lyrically about Epstein in writing: “Once upon a time, an intelligent, sharp-witted man they call ‘mysterious’ parachuted into my life… wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!”

Five days later, another old friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who’d also, allegedly, waxed lyrically about him in writing (“We have certain things in common, Jeffrey. Yes, we do, come to think of it. Enigmas never age, have you noticed that…?”), arrived in Britain. This was Donald Trump. Starmer rolled out the red carpet and treated him to a state visit.

© Private Eye

September 13^th

Led by double-barrelled far-right rabble-rouser Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, failed thespian nepo-baby Laurence Fox and others, and addressed on a big screen by Sieg Heil-ing billionaire Elon Musk, a crowd of more than 100,000 people marched through London to protest against immigrants. They were particularly against foreigners who were criminals and a danger to women being allowed into Britain. According to reports, some protestors wore MAGA – Make America Great Again – hats in honour of Donald Trump: a foreigner who’s a convicted criminal, and a proven danger to women, who was being allowed into Britain for a state visit the following week.

September 16^th

Donald Trump landed in Britain and his hosts immediately went into full pomp-and-ceremony grovelling mode. The orange American president got a royal salute, a lunch with the Royal Family, a tour of the Royal Collection, a ‘beating retreat’ military ceremony, a ride in a gilded coach, a state banquet at Windsor Castle, and a visit to Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, for a look at the Winston Churchill archives and a press conference.

Speaking at the state banquet, Trump declared, “…this is truly one of the highest honours of my life. Such respect for you and such respect for your country… The lionhearted people of this kingdom defeated Napoleon, unleashed the Industrial Revolution, destroyed slavery and defended civilization in the darkest days of fascism and communism. The British gave the world the Magna Carta, the modern parliament and Francis Bacon’s scientific method. They gave us the works of Locke, Hobbes, Smith and Burke, Newton and Blackstone. The legal, intellectual, cultural and political traditions of this kingdom have been among the highest achievements of mankind.”

A week later, Trump gave a speech to the United Nations and had this to say about London, capital of Britain, and Western Europe, of which Britain is a part: “And I have to say, I look at London where you have a terrible mayor, a terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been so changed, so changed. Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you’re in a different country, you can’t do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately… I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

Maybe the grovelling hadn’t worked.

From wikipedia.org / © Executive Office of the President of the US

September 17^th

American late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended indefinitely by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), following comments he made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. These drew the ire of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC’s chair is Brendan Carr, a staunch Trump loyalist. Trump applauded Carr as ‘a great American patriot’ for his actions.

Funnily enough, in 2022, Carr had declared: “Political satire is one of the oldest and most important forms of free speech. It challenges those in power while using humour to draw more into the discussion. That’s why people in influential positions have always targeted it for censorship.” And Kirk himself once said of freedom of speech: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.” But perhaps what they meant was political satire and outrageous things should only be expressed by people they agreed with.

September 22^nd

After an uproar from practically everybody, and their granny, and their dog, the forces that’d removed Jimmy Kimmel from the airwaves backtracked. It was announced that he was being reinstated on ABC. A new episode of his show was broadcast the following evening. It achieved his highest ever ratings – 6.26 million viewers – and was viewed 26 million times on YouTube. Kimmel quipped about Trump’s likely reaction: “He might have to release the Epstein files to distract us from this now.”

In other words… The American right, which earlier in the month had worked so hard to make a martyr out of Charlie Kirk, blaming his death on the ‘radical left’ and threatening retribution against anyone who suggested he might be anything less than a saint, had inadvertently made a martyr out of Jimmy Kimmel instead.

September 23^rd

Trump delivered an hour-long speech to the United Nations. Besides condemning the institution for a malfunctioning teleprompter and an escalator that stopped working – him and his missus Melania had to climb the stationary escalator, which for someone of his considerable acreage must have been hard work – and besides ranting about ‘radicalised environmentalists’ (“No more cows. We don’t want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows.”), he boasted that he’d ended seven wars: “…Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda… Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

In fact, two of these wars didn’t exist, two have continued in terms of ceasefire violations and ongoing bloodshed, one was a war Trump helped to start and then participated in, one was a war where one of the countries denies that Trump had anything to do with settling it, and one ended with a peace-deal that hasn’t yet been ratified.

That last war, the one Trump actually came closest to ending, was the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. Previously, at the September 18^th press conference with Keir Starmer, Trump claimed to have stopped a war between Albania and Azerbaijan. And at a dinner in Vermont on September 20^th, Trump announced that he’d ended a war between Armenia and Cambodia. So maybe that’s why Armenia and Azerbaijan agreed on a peace-deal. One was so busy fighting Albania, and the other so busy fighting Cambodia, that they no longer had time to fight each other.

Come to think of it, none of this was ironic. It was just moronic.

September 26^th

The Ryder Cup, golf’s biennial contest between Europe and the USA, teed off at Bethpage State Park in New York State. Trump attended its opening day, making him the first sitting American president to do so. It’s fair to say that his attitude towards golf – win at all costs, even if it means getting caddies to plant new balls for you when the old ones land in inconvenient places – and his attitude towards competition generally – win at all costs, no matter what a bullying, graceless, ignorant chump it makes you look – infected the crowd. Taking their cue from their Dear Leader, they behaved like bullying, graceless, ignorant chumps for the next couple of days. They chanted “F*ck you Rory!” at Northern Irish golfer Rory McIlroy. They threw beer at McIlroy’s wife. They hurled insults at McIlroy’s fellow Irish golfer Shane Lowry about his weight. No wonder at one point McIlroy told them all to “Shut the f*ck up.”

Anyhow, Europe won the Ryder Cup by 15 to 13. That wasn’t ironic either. That was karma.

From headtopics.com

I try not to post things on this blog in reaction to every right-wing halfwit who says something stupid in the press or on social media. Otherwise, I’d be stuck at my laptop and furiously writing blog entries 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, I’ll make an exception in the case of actor Laurence Fox.

As a graduate of Harrow School and a member of the Fox acting dynasty that also includes his father James, uncle Edward and cousins Emilia and Freddie, Laurence Fox is the epitome of the stereotypically posh and well-connected British thespian. He’s also now a darling of the Union Jack-waving, Brexit-loving, Boris-adoring, Trump-admiring, climate change-denying, Black Lives Matter-rejecting, coronavirus-doubting fraternity whose members include such charmers as Toby Young, Douglas Murray and Darren Grimes.

I’ve never seen the TV show Lewis (2006-2015) that made Fox’s name, and in fact prior to 2020 my only sighting of him had been in the 2001 British horror movie The Hole, made when he was in his early twenties and still able to pass for a teenager. The Hole tells the story of how a group of wealthy, spoilt and generally unbearable boarding-school brats, who include Fox, Keira Knightly and Desmond Harrington, skive off a study trip by hacking into their school’s computer and removing their names from the trip-records. Then they steal away to an abandoned underground bunker close to the school grounds, intending to hide there and party for the few days that the trip is in progress. After they descend into the bunker, they discover that they’ve been locked inside, and of course nobody knows they’re trapped there. Thereafter, things go clammily and ickily Lord of the Flies. The hideous youngsters succumb to paranoia and hysteria and eventual, fatal bouts of illness and violence. It turns out that their ordeal was engineered by the sneakily psychotic Thora Birch. Three cheers for Thora, I say.

The Hole contains a memorable moment where Knightly tells Fox to put his ‘cock away’. Recently, noting the controversies Fox has generated, the film critic Kim Newman wondered why nobody had made a gif or sound-clip of this available online.

Early in 2020 Fox made an appearance on the BBC’s politics / panel show Question Time where he exhibited the same qualities that he’d exhibited in The Hole, i.e., he came across as wealthy, spoilt and unbearable. He claimed the UK press’s treatment of Megan Markle wasn’t the result of racism because Britain was ‘the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe’, which will be a surprise to asylum seekers currently being accommodated by Serco and harassed by members of Britain First, and bleated at a person of colour in the Question Time audience who took issue with him that “to call me a white privileged male is to be racist. You’re being racist.”

Now calling Fox ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘privileged’ – for I’m sure his multiple family connections did nothing to hinder his ascendancy in the acting profession – doesn’t strike me as racist so much as truthful. However, Fox struck a chord with many right-wing malcontents unhappy with prevailing currents of political correctness and wokeness. People who were nostalgic for the good old days when you were allowed to nod along at Enoch Powell, good old Enoch, warning about how rivers would flow with blood if too many ‘wide-grinning picaninnies’ were allowed into Britain, and allowed to chuckle at Bernard Manning, good old Bernard, telling jokes about ‘darkies’ on the telly, admired the cut of Fox’s jib.

Soon he was being hailed as the new messiah of right-wing common sense and telling-it-like-it-is in the pages of the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and the like. And soon he was popping up here, there and everywhere in the media as a pundit sounding off about the failings of leftie-dominated Britain. (Somehow leftie-dominated despite it having a Conservative government for the last decade.)

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Sunday Times was quick to do a profile of Fox, in which he self-deprecatingly but possibly accurately described himself as ‘a knobbish dickhead half-educated tw*t’. Fox also revealed that he’d fallen out with his brother-in-law who, believe it or not, is the half-Nigerian comedian, actor, writer and filmmaker Richard Ayoade. Apparently, Ayoade said no when Fox asked for his public support after the Question Time appearance caused a furore. Indeed, Ayoade angrily told him, “You have never encountered racism.” To which Fox replied, “Yeah, I have. I’ve encountered racism from black people towards me, when I was working in Kenya for seven months. It’s the way you’re spoken to – racism can be deferential.”

Now I don’t know what ‘deferential racism’ is. Then again, neither does Fox, for when the Sunday Times interviewer asked him to explain what he meant, he said, “I’m just not smart enough to do it.”

Alas, poor Laurence had barely a moment to enjoy his time in the limelight as the new golden boy of all things un-PC and un-woke before he stuck his foot in his mouth. He criticised Sam Mendes’ World War I movie 1917 (2019) for featuring a Sikh soldier as a minor character. This, Fox alleged during a podcast with James Delingpole (who, incidentally, is another right-wing bladder-on-a-stick), was ‘forcing diversity on people’. Fox had to apologise when it was subsequently pointed out to him that some 130,000 Sikhs fought for Britain in World War I.

This week, Fox has been busy apologising again, to actress and comic performer (and his co-star in Lewis) Rebecca Front. Front, a supporter of Black Lives Matter, had had enough of Fox’s constant jabbering that white lives matter too and blocked him on twitter, which Fox claimed was an act of ‘cancellation’. He and Front then had a private text conversation about it, during which Front pointed out: “Black lives are systematically undervalued. Their work opportunities are fewer, their health outcomes far worse, the criminal justice system works against them. I think the least we can do is let them have a f**king slogan.” Afterwards, Fox tweeted a screenshot of their supposedly private conversation, which of course exposed his former co-star to the possibility of pile-ons and trolling by the demented right-wing dingbats who follow him.

No doubt realising that the spat was attracting attention and he wasn’t coming out of it well, he later announced: “…I tweeted a private text message. It isn’t true to my values to make a private conversation public just to make a point. I regret it.”

Self-pity is a major part of Fox’s schtick. He wails that nasty snowflake lefties, like Front, are out to cancel him. He wails that as a well-known, expensively educated, massively well-connected white person he should be getting as much attention as all those disadvantaged, oppressed-for-centuries black folk. And he wails too that his acting work is drying up because most of the showbiz world doesn’t like him for his untrendy views. I would have thought that in 2020, the year of Covid-19, a lot of actors’ work has dried up. Though after the spectacle he’s made of himself recently, would anyone want to spend the entire duration of a film-shoot or the entire run of a theatrical play in his unsufferable presence?

I suppose once upon a time I’d have taken comfort in the fact that the best the intolerant right can do for a figurehead is a bumbling, forever-shooting-himself-in-the-foot idiot like Fox. Surely that would mean they could never constitute a serious threat to society. However, when you look at who’s occupying Number 10 Downing Street, you realise being a grade-A jackass is absolutely no impediment to power these days. God help us. Laurence Fox could have a long and successful political career ahead of him.

Tag: Laurence Fox

A month of ironies

He’s not the right-wing messiah, he’s a very naughty boy