Don’t make me stand up for Graham Linehan, or this may be a very short column. Not a lot springs to mind.
Father Ted was, and remains, very funny. The IT Crowd wasn’t for me, but he won an Emmy for it. He seems lonely. And … yes, I’m done now.
Unfortunately, Linehan’s comedic canon has been overshadowed by the thousands and thousands of words he has posted on social media undermining the rights and human dignity of trans people, as part of his self-declared mission to “reveal the havoc gender identity has wrought on society … and help bring about its end”.
Linehan – once a brilliant comedy writer, now a semi-professional keyboard warrior – was in the news for a couple of reasons last week. One is before the courts. The other is the one that has brought me reluctantly to his defence: his dramatic arrest at Heathrow. Greeted off his flight from Arizona by five armed police officers, he was whisked off to a cell and questioned – a series of events so distressing, he says, he ended up hospitalised with “stroke territory” blood pressure.
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The reason for the arrest, he says, was three tweets he posted last April. One read: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” Another went: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** em.”
These tweets are crude, provocative, nasty and – shamefully for someone of his talents – profoundly unfunny. But the idea that they might also be criminal acts seems, to use the common parlance, straight out of Father Ted. If they are, Britain is going to need detention facilities big enough to hold the occupants of every teenage boys’ Snapchat group in the country.
Linehan and I do not, as far as I can discern, have any common ground when it comes to the rights of trans people. Many of the concerns he raises – about puberty blockers and surgery for trans young people; women’s sports; and the risk of sex offenders in women’s prisons – are shared by reasonable people. But they are sensitive, complex issues involving real lives which deserve careful, informed and empathetic handling; they should not be missiles in a shouty crusade. When he talks about trans people, he invokes the language of threats and predators, a conflation that is entirely without evidence and very troubling.
Linehan talks passionately about what this quest has cost him, without any reference to what it might have cost others. On journalist Ian O’Doherty’s State of Us podcast, he spoke at length about the toll of the cancellation of Father Ted the Musical; his various grievances involving former friends and the Late Late Show, which didn’t invite him on to promote his memoir. He said, sadly, that JK Rowling never mentions him (“I think I’m being briefed against, so I don’t get any solidarity”). And he movingly describes his depression. But he never addresses the question of how you can be the victim of an orchestrated online pile-on when you’re the one shouting loudest.
In his defence – here I go – both sides in the online “debate” about the rights of trans people have been guilty of emotive and sometimes vicious language. There are monomaniacs in both camps. But unlike trans people – whose right to live their lives in peace, safety and with dignity is at stake – Linehan has always had the choice to put his phone down and go for a walk (though he seems unable to do so for reasons he has never explained beyond “I did it for my wife and daughter and women generally”.)
But none of that is the point here. As I’ve written before, unless you believe in free speech for people whose views you find blinkered, wrong, even abhorrent, you don’t believe in free speech. British police sending five armed officers to Heathrow to arrest him was an act so cack-handed it can only have been a deliberate attempt to reignite the debate over hate speech laws. And, of course, that is what happened.
Rowling rushed to his defence (this should cheer him up), saying the UK had become a “totalitarian state”. Elon Musk tweeted: “Police state.” Conservative politicians and commentators the world over worked themselves into high dudgeon. Wes Streeting, UK health secretary, said prime minister Keir Starmer wanted the police to focus “policing the streets, not tweets”.
The Metropolitan Police appears to have got what it wanted: commissioner Mark Rowley issued a statement saying Britain’s free speech laws had put his officers in an “impossible position”, drawing them into “toxic culture-wars debates”. He said he was suggesting changes that would enable police to use their resources to tackle “cases creating real threats in the real world”. Mission accomplished, I expect.
Meanwhile, in a weird coincidence of timing, the Irish courts were busy pursuing a far more sensible approach. (In fairness, they’ve had some practice.) Once again, the issue of the other self-appointed martyr of the culture wars, Enoch Burke, was back before the courts, as Wilson’s Hospital School made an application to have him returned to jail in yet another bid to end his daily vigil at the gate.
Mr Justice David Nolan had a better idea. Locking Burke up only gives fuel to his “perverted sense of justice”, making him a martyr in his own eyes and those of his supporters. Instead, he hiked the daily fines from €1,400 to €2,000, and made orders for the collection of the €225,000 already notched up. And he suggested the school hire private security, because returning Burke to jail would only cause “the whole rigmarole” to start all over again.
It was a masterclass in how to avoid creating a circus – if only Britain had been paying attention.
