When will the luvvies stop hating England?

NO ONE has ever accused Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen of being an intellectual. He owes his fame and fortune to low- brow television makeover programmes, turning bog-standard suburban homes into miniature Bangkok brothels.

Middle England made him. Yet he clearly holds in contempt the millions who invited him into their living rooms.

Despite being born and educated in London, and now the proud owner of a 17th-century manor house in the Cotswolds, he is ashamed of the country and people which have given him everything.

‘I don’t often use the term “England” because I think it’s racist,’ he said in a magazine interview. ‘This is me speaking as a Welshman, an aborigine of this island.’ Lovely, tidy, smashing. Of course, there’s no accounting for the stupidity of celebrities when they are flaunting their alleged moral superiority over the rest of us. How else to explain this bizarre quote from the same interview? ‘You have to understand that the English all come from outside Amsterdam, which is why they tend to be ginger and tall.’ Eh?

Leave that aside, though, and concentrate on his assertion that ‘England’ is somehow synonymous with racism. It’s hardly an original thought, especially among selfstyled ‘intellectuals’.

George Orwell nailed it in an essay written in 1941: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

‘In Left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse-racing to suet puddings.

‘ It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save The King than of stealing from a poor box.’

I’ve no idea how Bowen dresses politically, but I’m prepared to hazard a guess that he voted Remain in the Brexit referendum.

It is an article of faith among proEU zealots that every single one of the 17.4 million people who voted Leave only did so because they hate foreigners.

The notion that ‘English’ equals ‘racist’ runs deep in Luvvie Land, as it does in political circles.

Remember the sneering, aristocratic disdain Labour’s Emily Thornberry displayed on stumbling across a white van outside a house bedecked in St George flags?

Presumably this is also the kind of English patriotism which Llewelyn- Bowen finds so offensive. Even though he was born in Kensington and privately educated in South London, he has gone to great lengths to distance himself from his quintessentially English upbringing.

He has chosen to drape himself in his Welsh ancestry, adopting his surgeon father’s middle name, Llewelyn, as his own. His two siblings are known simply as Bowen.

I suppose Laurence LlewelynBowen does suggest a certain hauteur. Would his career as a ‘homestyle consultant’ have taken off quite so successfully if he’d been plain old Larry Bowen?

There’s nothing wrong with celebrating your roots, although some people do take it to extremes. Alastair Campbell, as I mentioned recently, was born in Yorkshire, went to grammar school in Leicester, attended Cambridge University and supports Burnley, which is in Lancashire.

Yet he never misses an opportunity to pull on a kilt and play the bagpipes.

Then again, Campbell is another who thinks that the English are essentially a nation of xenophobes. Why do they find overt Englishness so threatening? After all, the same people who believe in inherent English racism are only too happy to embrace Scottish nationalism, which showed its ugly face during the independence campaign, and blood-stained Irish nationalism.

Some of the worst offenders come from the arts and literature. The further they are from home, the more emboldened they feel to attack their own country.

THE authors Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie have been at it again recently, snarling about the stupidity of their countrymen and women in voting to leave the EU.

Both now live in America, so what difference does Brexit make to them? It is simply a way of burnishing their intellectual credentials, sneering at the ignorant scum they’ve left behind.

You might have thought that Rushdie, in particular, would show a little more humility and gratitude to the British taxpayers who spent millions protecting him from the death sentence passed by Ayatollah Khomeini for ‘ blaspheming’ the Prophet in his book The Satanic Verses. Still, humility isn’t something we’ve come to expect from the literary illuminati, especially preening, self-obsessed snobs like Rushdie. Never mind The Satanic Verses, I’d have strung him up on the strength of Midnight’s Children.

Actors are just as bad, by and large. Every time Emma Thompson lands in Hollywood she seems unable to resist tipping a large bucketload of ordure on the folks back home.

Look at me, she’s saying, I’m a citizen of the world, not a backward, racist island off the coast of Europe — proving yet again that Orwell’s words are as relevant today as they were more than 75 years ago.

Recently, we saw the Last Night Of The Proms hijacked by Remainers handing out EU flags and the BBC refusing to broadcast Rule Britannia in Scotland and Wales for fear of upsetting the Celts.

Next year, they’ll probably hire Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen to give the Albert Hall a makeover, removing anything which smacks of Britishness — or, heaven forfend, Englishness — once and for all.

They could call it the Last Night Of The Poms.