LUVVIE ACTUALLY!
Remoaners. eco bores. Ocean-going pseuds. as a sequel is made, why the cast of the romcom love actually is the most achingly right-on ever assembled ...
A SHORT sequel to the 2003 movie Love Actually reunites cast members including Hugh Grant and Colin Firth for Red Nose Day this Friday. But have there ever been so many bleeding-heart luvvies in one movie? Seeing as they’ve given so many opinions on subjects from the environment and poverty to Brexit, the film should have been called Luvvie Actually. CHRISTOPHER HART runs his Luvvie-O-Meter over the cast . . .
EMMA THOMPSON
SUReLy the uberluvvie of our age? She played a stayat-home mother in Love Actually, but in real life has an estimated net worth of £30 million and lives in a £4 million house in her beloved leafy Hampstead — the third highestincome borough in Britain.
yet in a TV interview, she hilariously called her North London home turf ‘suburban . . . very ordinary’. She changed her tune two years ago, however, when she campaigned against a new Tesco express store opening in nearby Belsize Park, which she described as ‘a villagey area’.
More seriously, she said that Britain had failed to take in thousands of refugees from Calais because of ‘racism’. ‘We’ve got plenty of room for them,’ she argued.
She also said the UK’s response to the refugee crisis in europe was ‘shaming’.
On Brexit she said: ‘I feel european, even though I live in Great Britain — and Scotland as well.’ (yes, emma is a secondhome owner.)
emma also held forth on refugees while standing on the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival, dressed to the nines and swathed in a white faux fur stole. Priceless!
Oh, and she has described Ukip’s Nigel Farage as a ‘white nationalist’.
So the more than 50 per cent of Britain’s Sikhs who voted Leave . . . they’re just confused, are they, aligning themselves politically with a ‘white nationalist’?
Finally, there is emma’s delicious ‘humble-bragging’ about her daughter Gaia, who is named after a Greek deity. Miss Thompson got a role in one recent film, she explained, because Gaia was sitting next to ‘Robert Redford — whom I adore — at the Golden Globes’.
So that’s how it works! LUVVIE RATING: 10/10
HUGH GRANT
AMONG the many fashionable causes espoused by luvviedom (though you may have missed it), one fine example is . . . Belarus.
In 2014, Hugh Grant — who played a dashing prime minister in Love Actually — added his name to yet another of those famously self-important ‘open letters’ by luvvies, apparently demanding the attention of the world.
It called upon ice hockey players not to go to Belarus to play in the World Ice Hockey Championships, because to do so would be to support ‘ europe’s last dictator’, Belarus’s strongman president, Alexander Lukashenko.
Among other repressive measures, Lukashenko has been accused of muzzling a free Press. By odd coincidence, Hugh Grant would like to restrict Press freedom as well, through the Hacked Off pressure group. Now that’s funny!
Inevitably, he is a staunch Remainer and said recently: ‘ If I had to put money on it I would be surprised if we Brexit. Don’t forget, the referendum was only an advisory; it was not a compelling thing.
‘I think it might be fudged, especially now that people are starting to realise quite what a selfwound it was.’
Grant has also publicly lamented: ‘As much as I adore myself, I’m quite keen to find someone else to care about more.’ A difficult task, given that he holds himself in such extraordinarily high regard. LUVVIE RATING: 8/10
BILL NIGHY
NIGHy, who played ageing rock ’n’ roll legend Billy Mack in Love Actually, wears his political colours on his sleeve: ‘I vote Labour, obviously. Well, look around you — where else are you going to go?’ He’s taken roles in typically luvvie films such as Pride, about lesbians and gay men backing the miners’ strike in the eighties.
He’s appeared in short films such as The Banker, written by his old friend Richard Curtis — director of Love Actually — which argued for a ‘Robin Hood tax’ on financial transactions to help fight poverty in the Third World. The campaign — started by Richard Curtis himself —
turns out to be a cabal of multi- millionaire actors, scriptwriters and assorted luvvies demanding the poor be helped by levying higher taxation on bankers. But if banks are subjected to new taxes, as night follows day they will pass on the costs to us, the customers. In the past, when the wealthy wanted to help the poor, they spent their money lavishly, founding schools, hospitals, libraries and social housing trusts. Our Left- leaning, very well- heeled celebs now show they care for the deprived by . . . demanding higher taxation. How generous! Nighy also featured in a BBC drama written by Curtis called The Girl In The Cafe, which seemed to be driven by a Leftie agenda. He played a civil servant who falls in love with a woman he then takes along to a G8 summit, only to discover she is an activist who confronts the PM on Third World debt. Inevitably, in Curtis-world, he is spellbound by her arguments and tries to help her end world poverty. credentials by appearing in a memorable broadcast in support of Ed Miliband’s joke of a Labour Party. He was seen intoning the words: ‘ Now I don’t know about you, but my values are about community, compassion, decency — that’s how I was brought up.’ Which wasn’t so much ‘virtue-signalling’ as ‘virtue-declaring’. He droned on: ‘Labour, they start from the right place. Community, compassion, fairness — all the best things about this country ‘I love this country so much and I love the people in it, and I think you do, too. But really, for me, there’s only one choice. And I choose Labour.’ Freeman’s then partner, the Sherlock actress Amanda Abbington, weighed in by tweeting: ‘F*** the Tories.’ None of this stopped Ed Miliband being humiliated at the ballot box. ( But Miliband was positively centrist compared with Arthur Scargill’s far-Left Socialist Labour Party, for whom Freeman voted in 2001.) Keen to advance his luvvie credentials, Freeman says that seeing Mrs Thatcher in power settled his political opinions. ‘There were goodies and baddies, and she made things much clearer for me.’ And here is the very essence of Leftie- liberal politics. It doesn’t mean you simply have different views from those who are more conservative; it means you are a Good Person, and they are Bad. Whether Freeman was a good or bad person when it came to his family finances