On Wednesday, the professionally cross actor-songwriter Laurence Fox was taken off air by GB News, the newsertainment channel funded by the Brexiter philanthropist and banjo spaffer Sir Paul Marshall. Fox had performed a light comic monologue to a clearly delighted Dan Wootton in which he explained that only cuckolded incels would climb into bed with the left-leaning political journalist Ava Evans. “Who’d want to shag that?” opined the professional controversial opinionator, controversially.
But Fox’s joke did not align with the values of GB News and by midday he had been let go by the notoriously values-ridden channel. Later on, on BBC Politics Live, Tiny Tim Stanley of the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, said that if Fox had been appearing as Macbeth at the National Theatre, he wouldn’t have been on GB News slagging off women and that he was only doing it “because he has been driven out of the mainstream”. I’m not an Olivier award-nominated theatre director (Oh, hang on! I am!!), but arguably it’s hard to suspend disbelief and be captivated by a Macbeth if you know the actor playing him has been burning Pride flags in his garden. And is it the job of the National Theatre to employ delinquent far-right-leaning actors in Shakespeare plays in order to keep them out of trouble, like some kind of iambic borstal?
