Darling Ems, luvviedom’s head girl!
Breast-beating. Endlessly earnest. And stonkingly rich. In his ego-popping new book, QUENTIN LETTS admits – despite her absurdities – he still has a soft spot for Emma Thompson
ALL this week, in extracts from his brilliant new book, Quentin Letts pierces the pretensions of society’s most annoying people. Today, he turns to the luvvies who, as he says, can be hard to love . . .
DEAR OLD Emma Thompson. She’s luvviedom’s head girl and her own greatest performance. In her various roles she gives it her all, widening her eyes, crumpling that pruney chin. Hollywood loves her and pays her accordingly. She is thick into the brass.
But, most of all, Emma cares. She cares so much that tears may soon spring to her spaniel eyes.
Or maybe the moment calls for defiance mode with a jutted jaw and a lashing-out of bad language, substituting her habitual ‘crumbs’ and ‘gollys’ for ‘f*** this’ and ‘f*** that’.
She cares about the planet and the poor. She aches for Labour (been a member ‘all my life’ — which means she backed Foot, then Blair, then Corbyn) and thinks Tories are evil, or something like that. Not evil in a biblical way, of course. She is a ‘libertarian anarchist’ when it comes to religion. As a tub-thumping atheist, she has talked about how some of the Bible offends her and how she ‘refutes’ it.
Fancy word, refute. It means ‘prove to be wrong’. Millennia of religious teaching are thus overturned with one flick of an overpaid actress’s ash-blonde hair. Emma fights for feminism. When not beating her breast about Palestine or refugees or Aids sufferers or Heathrow airport’s expansion, she campaigns for the Galapagos turtle, even though it looks a bit like Norman Tebbit.
Ems is like that, you see. Forgiving. Big-hearted. So long as you’re not talking about religion.
Anyway, if she met rotten old Tory Tebbit she would probably want to win him over, because actors are like that. They yearn to be loved. So, she would try to josh nasty Norm along and do one of her little self-deprecating routines, which are always so amusing in a middle-class way.
She’s good with people, is Emma. She camouflages her blazing intolerance with English irony. What a star!
Why should we pay her political views any attention? After all, feminism (which seems to be her core belief) is based on egalitarian principles. And if egalitarianism’s logic of one person being no better than the next is to be pursued, why should a la-di-dah celebrity from a posh part of North London be any more worth listening to than a Ukip-supporting councilhouse knuckle-dragger from Boston, Lincs, or a Trump voter in Tallahassee, or even a turbanned ayatollah in Tehran?
Emma, however, does not see it that way. She argues that ‘anyone with any sort of voice has a duty to plug into what they think needs to be said’. Crumbs. That sounds very much like elitish self-justification — a manifesto for celebrity proselytising — does it not?
Who could resent Em her public altruism? She is so valiantly earnest, shoulder-shrugging in an aw-shucks Cambridge Footlights way. (She was at Cambridge with the likes of Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry and porcelain-petite heartbreaker Sandi Toksvig).
Those Footlights people perfect the art of being patrician without ever quite seeming it.
The British ruling class is artful at that sort of disguise. It has been perfected over centuries of selfsurvival, filing down the rough edges of autocracy and throwing in a few jokes so that hoi polloi don’t notice they are jolly well being told what to do by the old boss types.
Life has certainly gone Thompson’s way. She is wonderfully rich, allegedly worth £30million (though that looks like an accountant’s under-estimate).
A cynic would say she made the money partly by being a brand — lovely, Left-wing Ems, acclaimed by the Beeb and Guardian as a national double-yolker.
That sort of thing is terrific for the bottom line.
Fie such cynicism! We fully accept that Ems is a sincere old biscuit and, come the Corbyn revolution, will happily forego her holidays on
private yachts and will settle for a wet week in a beach-hut in Skeggy.
Emma’s socialism is of the elastic variety. She is a great friend of Prince Charles, has a lovely house in Hampstead and a second in Scotland. Oh, all right, that probably means her carbon footprint is ginormous — a very Emma word — and jetting round the world from film set to film set must positively gobble down the eco-equivalent of acres of Brazilian rainforest, but just look at all the tax she pays.
But she is using her voice, remember. She is ‘doing her duty’.
And yes, she sent her daughter Gaia to a private school (though she left to be home schooled after, she said, she was called a ‘hippy’ by classmates), which might look like stinking hypocrisy given her support for the anti-grammars Labour Party. But at least that opened up another state-school place for a poor person.
Or a refugee. Like the Rwandan child-soldier Emma and her handsome second husband Greg Wise adopted in line with her view that Britain should take in more refugees. ‘We’ve got plenty of room for them,’ she declared.
How would she countenance a
temporary refugee camp on H ampstead Heath then? Maybe not so well. When T es co proposed o pening one of its Express mini supermarket sin near by BelsizePark, Emma (along with some fellow c elebs) c ampaigned a gainst it, arguing that the shop would-blight that ‘villagey’ area. Village? Belsize bloody Park?
Despite her absurdities I still have a soft spot for Emma T hompson. It must be lingering affection f or h er l ate f ather’s v oice narrating T he M agic R oundabout with Zebedee and Dougal.
Other actors and celebs who follow her lead as aha nd-wringing Lefty are not always solikeable, however.
Lily Allen, a pop singer, adopts drearily right-on postures on Brexit, refugees and other matters. Actor Michael Sheen was cross-after his home area, South Wales, supported Brexit.
SHERLOck star Martin Freeman (an intelligent man) fronted a Labour Party election broadcast in which he bragged thathis values were ‘community, c ompassion, d ecency’? G ood g rief, he’ll play St Augustine next.
There i s a w ord f or F reeman a nd Thompson and their ilk. They are known as ‘influentials’, meaning celebrities who can influence the views of their fans.
Advertising agencies will cite statistics showing how sales of a certain brand of scent rise when someone like Helen Mirren stars in advertisements.
Similarly, political strategists insist that voters are influenced when a Martin Freeman or David Tennant p resents a p arty-political broadcast for Labour.
Former D octor W ho s tar T ennant likes t o p arade h is L abour s upport (‘all my life,’ he says) and desire for Scottish independence. He says Britain is in for a ‘dark time’ outside the EU and he went on American television to describe Donald Trump as a ‘tangerine ballbag’, a ‘wiggy slice’ and a ‘witless f***ing c***splat’.
Before t he 2 010 g eneral e lection, Tennant backed Gordon Brown and said: ‘I would rather have a prime m inister w ho i s t he c leverest person in the room than a prime minister who looks good in a suit. I think David cameron is a t errifying prospect.’ How good to hear a much-packaged TV star decry image.
But are voters really swayed by celebrity? I find it hard to believe.
Voters did not warm toJeremycorbynbecausehewassupported b y t he l ikes o f L ily A llen and Steve coogan. They were attracted to the simplicity of his message and the fact that he seemed t o b e o utside t he n etworky, money-driven System thatenriches such luvvies.
I suspect it was the same with the Scottish independencer eferendum i n 2 014, w hen L ondon’s club-class elite belatedly woke up to the possibility that Scotland might vote to leave the United kingdom. People who for years had mocked the Union Jack and had inveighed against Britishness and national institutions now pushed themselves to the fore to say what a terrible thing it would be if the Scots believed the siren lu ring soft he Scot sNat sand opted f or s elf-rule.
The Guardian ran around- robin billet-doux urging Scots voters: ‘Let’s stay together. What unites us is much greater than what divides us.’
Signatories i ncluded: n ewspaper columnist David Aaronovitch, sailor Sir Ben Ainslie, Olympic runner-turned-motivation al speaker kris sAk abu si ,‘ property porn’ telly presenter kirstie A llsopp, Sir David Attenborough, Lady (Joan) Bakewell, Wombles theme-tune composer Mike Batt, drag impersonator StanleyBaxter, historians Mary Beard and Antony Beevor, retired cricket umpire Dickie Bird, cilla Black, Lord (Melvyn) Bragg, Jo Brand, Gyles Brandreth, actor Rob Brydon.
And that was just the As andBs. The rest of the alphabet followed, culminating in David Walliams and actors Dominic West and kevin Whately. Did the Guardian letter have any effect on the way Scots voted in the referendum? Who can say?
But what made Tracey Emin, to choose just one of those peaches, think her plea would make a wavering Scottish voter think: I was going to vote Yes toindependence, but I am changing my m ind b ecause T racey i s s uch a brilliant artist?
What r easoning l ed a n a ctor w ith as slight an artistic pedigree as Stephen Mangan to think, I am loved! I am gorgeous! My voice is bound to carry sway on the housing estates of Dundee? Luvvies, eh? D on’t y ou l ove t hem a nd t heir sheer, breath-taking self-importance? Well, since you ask . . .
n A dApted from patronising Bastards: How the elites Betrayed Britain, by Quentin Letts, published by Constable on October 12 at £16.99. © Quentin Letts 2017. to order a copy for £13.59 (offer valid until October 14, 2017), visit mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 0844 571 0640. p&p is free on orders over £15.