Did some randos calling him a “racist” on the platform formerly known as Twitter cost Laurence Fox his acting career? No, suggests a judgment from the high court, where a judge also found the actor turned thought leader to have defamed said randos by calling them “paedophiles”. You can’t just call any old person a paedophile, apparently – unless you’re the owner of Twitter/X, of course, and you get sued in the US as opposed to the UK, like Elon Musk did by that Thai cave rescue diver a few years back. Appearing on the steps outside a Los Angeles courtroom following his favourable verdict, Musk declared: “My faith in humanity is restored.” These were not the words of Laurence Fox yesterday.
Instead, the Reclaim party leader and Hunter Biden biopic star offered a nine-minute monologue outside the high court that had a distinctly “after lunch” feel to it. “What we’ve got, after several million quid, is a nothing burger,” elucidated Fox. Laurence was wearing glasses with transition lenses, which – and like him, I’m just making a rhetorical point here – always look like a come-and-get-me plea to the beast wing at HMP Full Sutton. He was accompanied by his girlfriend, Liz Barker. Liz believes the moon landings were faked, and has previously stated she doesn’t buy the whole theory of human evolution from apes. (“No. I think we come from another race.”)
A supposed free-speech nut suing for libel (not his first rodeo), Laurence brought his counterclaim on the basis that “I felt that one of the most important things I had in this world was my good name”. Mm-hm. I can’t help feeling that that ship had not just already sailed, but been sunk in the Solent around 300 years before the development of the electric lightbulb. If suitable donors emerge – more on that later – Laurence’s good name might one day be raised off the ocean floor, dragged in fragments to Portsmouth, and painstakingly restored as a time capsule of early 21st-century absurdity. Do recall this entire case began with a supermarket tweeting about Black History Month.
Nevertheless, the trial itself arguably added to the gaiety of the nation, as Laurence discoursed on the discourse, and claimed to have been offered a role in The Batman before his career was derailed. That remains unverified, though I can definitely see him playing one of the guys who kill Bruce Wayne’s parents. As for Fox’s claim that he had been approached for a part in Succession … Clearly, it’s a huge honour for a show like Succession to find itself woven into Laurence’s spellbinding “before” story. Even so, it must be said the idea he was up for a part in it was certainly eye-catching news, most particularly to those behind Succession. No one had any memory of such a thing. Was it remotely possible that at some point he had appeared on a British casting assistant’s longlist? It’d have to have been a very long list, seems to be the polite answer. “We definitely talked about him a lot in the writers’ room,” one writer reflects. “Just not in connection with a part …”
Yet despite all his humiliations and defeats, Laurence Fox’s essential ridiculousness and poignantly insatiable need for attention confine him to the comic spectrum as opposed to the tragic. He is more of a Malvolio than a Macbeth. Shortly after his fateful appearance on Question Time, Laurence boasted to the Sunday Times of having been the only person to have turned up for an appearance on QT “with guitars and shit”. Even now, I am unable to type that without laughing.
Everything he has done since that moment feels like a pose – a way for a middling supporting actor to get four-time-Oscar-winner attention. There’s a reason toddler psychologists call behaviour like this “acting out”. The second Laurence feels he’d get more attention/cash for the apology tour or exposé of the hard right, you might expect him to execute a 180 and release at least two bluegrass albums about his journey. Working titles: Redemption Creek and Question Time?
Speaking of questions, however, let us turn to the received wisdom that Fox is permanently broke. In fact, some interested parties profess surprise at the implication that he struggles financially after the drying up of acting offers, when in fact Laurence benefits from huge sums of money every year courtesy of Jeremy Hosking. Having been the third-biggest Brexit donor, Hosking is the mega-rich investor who funds Reclaim, and has given it millions, apparently indifferent to the fact he has barely a vote to show for it. Hosking’s Brexit crusade has pivoted to the culture wars and anti-net zero agenda. To give you a sense of just how deep his pockets are, the MP Andrew Bridgen was last year belatedly forced to declare that Hosking had stumped up £4,470,576.42 in interest-free loans to fund a doomed legal action against Bridgen’s brother for control of the family potato farm. Bridgen was relieved of the Tory whip for comparing the Covid vaccine to the Holocaust, then briefly joined Reclaim, but is now back as an independent. Hosking is still donating to his campaign to retain his seat.
Whatever is going on here, it seems pretty clear that Laurence Fox is just one of the idiot faces of it. Who is this backroom man, lavishly funding one dickhead’s extended breakdown as part of a campaign to buy his way to political and cultural influence, at the same time as bleating publicly about the state of our democracy? Why should Hosking prefer to lead from behind while his paid fool or fools create busywork or diversions? The last recorded accounts for the Reclaim party cover the period until November 2021. Their up-to-date figures are long overdue – as, perhaps, is our focus on the organ grinder rather than the monkey.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
