Hugh Grant’s a fool on politics unless lines are written for him

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

It has been a bit of a ritual in our family to watch Love Actually at the tail end of a long Christmas Day. It’s television Berocca, a two-hour infusion of fizz on the sofa to settle the mind and the stomach after copious amounts of family and food. But we won’t be watching this year.

While Hugh Grant’s interlude with a hooker on Sunset Boulevard never interfered with watching him play a fictional prime minister, the actor’s dalliance with British politics this week is a bridge too far.

Alas, in a vibrant democracy we must expect to hear unscripted bleating from celebrities and minor royals with side gigs as remonstrating activists. Prince Harry stands barefoot on a beach beseeching the world to act to stop a climate emergency, having travelled there on a private jet. And his wife Meghan boasts to the world, and her royal in-laws who have three children, that she will be having only two children for the sake of the planet.

Who can forget Hollywood thinking if it sided with Hillary Clinton, it would keep Donald Trump out of the White House?

Cate Blanchett implores Australians to “think” in the wake of the 2005 Cronulla riots. Picture: Renee Nowytarge

Or, going back further, when Cate Blanchett stood at Sydney’s Coogee Beach after the Cronulla riots wearing a white T-shirt with a silhouette of Australia emblazoned with the word “THINK”. She declared that “violence and racism are bad”. You don’t say? Except the actress seemed to have less to say publicly about violence and racism when, some years earlier, a gang of Muslim men was raping young white women.

On one measure, Grant is one among many actors who, when they dabble in real-life politics, prove why screenwriters are integral to a movie’s success.

Recently, the English actor played a moderately good fictional politician in A Very English Scandal, and he absolutely nailed it as the dopey, clueless prime minister who wears his heart on his sleeve, wants to shag the tea lady and stare down the US president in Love Actually.

But when Grant immersed himself into the British election last week, he was wearing a particularly demented form of democracy on his sleeve, demanding the British vote on Brexit — again. And, this time, be a jolly good sport and vote the same way as him.

How the tables have turned. After Grant’s sexual transaction in Hollywood, the awful British paparazzi snapped his girlfriend, Liz Hurley, standing hands firmly on hips, aiming a few sharp words at Grant, his hands outstretched as if to explain it was all a dreadful mistake. These days Grant is doing all the finger-wagging, at the majority of British voters for their far bigger crime of voting to leave the EU. A dreadful mistake, that democratic decision in 2016. Amends can be made by joining Grant’s “tactical voting” campaign to unseat enough Tories to stop Brexit.

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Not even Grant can put a pretty face to the Remoaners’ ugly illiberal project. They don’t see a second referendum as another exercise in democracy. They are wedded to a second referendum to cement their anti-democratic yearning for Britain to remain part of the European transnational project. It is a very European way to betray democracy.

Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant attend a film premiere, in 1999, before their split. Picture: File

Grant is also the face of that egregious form of modern tyranny described by CS Lewis in one of a series of essays in God in the Dock. Lewis writes that the worst kind of tyranny comes from, “those sincerely exercised for the good of its victims”. How much better it would be, says the English writer, “to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be sati­ated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

One of the great curiosities of democracy is that it has encouraged a growing class of tyrannical busybodies who don’t care much for democracy. They are permanent features at the UN, rife in the EU, found in courts and deep inside government bureaucracies too. In fact, you will find them just about any place where democratic decisions get in the way of the beautiful vision that these philosopher kings have in mind for the lumpenproletariat.

Grant’s problem is that he earns more kudos for his looks than his political activism. If that is sexist, please have a word to Lib Dem mayoral candidate Siobhan Benita. Introducing him last week while he was campaigning for her Lib Dem colleague in the Cities of London and Westminster seat, she said she would try not to swoon. As The Sun reported, “Hugh raised an eyebrow and looked as if he’d rather be elsewhere. As if he was fed up with being objectified for his body. How come no one fancied him for his mind?”

Our Ozzy friends on @SkyNewsAust nail @HackedOffHugh brilliantly “I want to projectile vomit 🤮 “ pic.twitter.com/FhCw93A6IT

— Andy Wigmore (@andywigmore) December 9, 2019

Maybe because Grant has all the hallmarks of bloke with a script, claiming Brexit will kill jobs, cause food shortages, end British manufacturing and destroy peace in Northern Ireland. But on the hop, he is an actor with no lines.

While campaigning for Labour last Wednesday in northeast London Grant was heckled by people concerned about Labour’s well-documented failure to deal with anti-Semitism in its own ranks. When asked whether local Jewish voters should vote for Labour, the actor was saved by Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen, who said she was very sorry for past mistakes. When Grant was asked whether Jeremy Corbyn would make a good prime minister, he simply didn’t answer.

To be fair, Grant is not alone fulminating against British democracy. The love-in last week between former Conservative prime minister John Major and former Labour leader Tony Blair was a rolled-gold reminder of how, for three years, both major parties rebuffed the democratic decision of 17.4 million people in 2016.

But Grant’s foppish public posturing provides the British people with further impetus to say good riddance to faux democrats.