Politicians who campaigned to bring Egyptian democracy activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah to Britain are ducking for cover now that his past social media posts have come to light.
Famous faces who agitated for El-Fattah – include Judi Dench, Olivia Colman and the inevitable Emma Thompson – should be just as embarrassed. While it’s commendable to show solidarity with jailed democrats, those who also call for the killing of supporters of Jewish nationhood in Israel probably shouldn’t be top of the list for your human rights poster boy.
The very fact that stars of stage and screen were gushing over El-Fattah was a massive red flag. Celebrity backing for humanitarian and political causes is eagerly sought by canny NGOs that understand just how far a sprinkling of stardust goes.
If you want news media coverage, and through it the attention of politicians, few assets are as valuable as an award-winning thesp or an aging chart-topper willing to ink your petition, post about your campaign on social media, or appear in one of those black-and-white ads where they sombrely hold up your hashtag before looking away from the camera as a Sarah McLachlan song plays.
The notion that fame or accomplishment in the arts or in entertainment should confer special insight into politics, war, injustice or ethics is almost primitive in its trembling obeisance to the most minor of gods.
Being on the telly does not elevate your political opinions above those of the viewers watching you at home. This is a fame-centric variation of the Chomsky fallacy: the risible superstition that Noam Chomsky’s scholarly expertise in generative grammar qualifies him as an analyst of US foreign policy.
Just as no one shouts “Is there a doctor of humanities on the plane?” when a passenger takes ill, no one trying to achieve peace in the Middle East or bring democracy to Burma or end drought in the Zambezi basin has ever banged a table and yelled: “Dammit, we need a Bafta winner and we need one now.”
It’s not just that actors and musicians believe themselves well-placed to opine on global affairs, it’s the deference shown to their semi-researched and vibes-based perspectives by lawmakers and the news media. Parliament is on the brink of nodding through assisted suicide – and a recklessly ill-designed version at that – partly because the Prime Minister promised former television presenter Dame Esther Rantzen he would make time for MPs to consider it.
Far from keeping it under wraps that British doctors could soon be doling out killer drugs to vulnerable patients as a favour to the PM’s celebrity pal, Keir Starmer has boasted about keeping his word to the That’s Life! presenter, who is suffering from terminal lung cancer. .
Dame Esther deserves our sympathy but she should not be able to hijack the legislative process simply because she once had a hit television series. That she enjoys such influence is not the result of a surfeit of empathy among decision-makers and opinion-formers. It is because she is echoing the priorities and preferences of the progressive establishment that her outsized involvement in the legislative process is framed in sympathetic terms.
Celebrity interventions are deemed legitimate only if they are considered progressive by the political and media class. This is why any public figure who emotes inarticulately about transwomen being women, typically accompanied by an expletive or two by way of reasoned argument, can expect to be written up as “brave” and “compassionate” – while an essay from JK Rowling dispassionately explaining why women’s sex-based rights must be upheld will invariably be reported as “divisive” or “insensitive”.
In fact, to demonstrate the absurdity of allowing celebrity political witterings to influence public policy, you need only flip the ideological tables. It’s probably safe to assume Starmer will not be promising Christopher Biggins Parliamentary time to debate his recent call to restore the death penalty. Nor should he.
I’m willing to bet Biggins has done as much research into penology as El-Fattah’s famous fans did his social media output. Those in the limelight are entitled to their opinions. They are not entitled to instant capitulation to those opinions.
In the 2004 satirical movie Team America: World Police, the Janeane Garofolo puppet explains: “As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion.” This is about right.
Most actors, even very good ones, aren’t about to be confused for Bertrand Russell, and their political analysis is typically midwit The Rest is Politics slop. There could almost be a rule in this: the more celebrity supporters a cause attracts the likelier it is to be a terrible idea.
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