Drunk luvvie’s foul rant at Brexit voters
THERE has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth among luvvies since Britain voted to leave the EU, but none of them has yet abused the voters face to face. Until now.
On Saturday, at the Port Eliot Festival in the West Country, which voted overwhelmingly for Brexit, film director Bruce Robinson let fly a volley of expletives at the locals during a talk he was giving.
‘It was unbelievable,’ reports a visitor to the arts festival, which is held at the Cornish estate of the late 10th Earl of St Germans, a louche friend of Prince Charles.
‘Robinson was clearly drunk and his talk was such a shambles that members of the audience started booing.
‘This led him to respond with a foul-mouthed rant which included calling the audience “a load of Ukip c***s”. This caused uproar among the audience.
‘After ranting away for a while longer, Robinson eventually walked off the stage early.’
Robinson, 70, is best known for writing and directing the cult classic Withnail And I, starring Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.
The Eighties film drew on his experiences as ‘a chronic alcoholic and resting actor, living in squalor’ in London’s Camden Town.
The director, who has two children with his artist wife Sophie Windham, gave up booze in 2003.
‘I was drinking so much that it was threatening the most important thing in my life — my family,’ he later admitted. ‘I’d have finished the first bottle of red by ten in the morning. I was drinking four or five bottles a day. I’d come in here like some greasy ghost, completely wasted, every night. I went to the AA.’
However, he fell off the wagon while shooting The Rum Diary, a 2011 film starring hard-living Johnny Depp.
Yesterday, Robinson began a second talk at the festival by making a fulsome apology for his behaviour the previous day. ‘I was so drunk by the time I got up here that I could barely see,’ he told the audience. ‘I blame it on the French with all that red wine.’
He said he had been offered a glass by every festival-goer he had met, adding: ‘I’m sticking to water today.’