The campaign for greater press regulation in Britain has suffered a devastating, possibly fatal blow with the release to the Guardian of a list of the celebrities who are lending their support to the Leveson Royal Charter proposal.
“Wankers. Faarsands of them!” commented one former fan of press regulation on seeing the list: “I used to think the British press had got too intrusive and badly needed reining in. But now that I’ve been made aware of the kind of ocean-going knobs who are in favour of the Leveson Royal Charter, I’ve adjusted my position. In fact I’d like to know why the Sun isn’t hacking every single one of these smug, authoritarian, liberty-loathing tossers’ mobile phone messages right now, preferably with a view to chucking every one of them into jail for hamster abuse or whatever else it is they get up to in their celebrity basement dungeons. The sooner these menaces are off the streets the better.”
If this made up quote sounds at all over the top, you clearly have yet to see the list of names, a veritable Who’s Who of Britain’s bien-pensant, chattering-class Wankerati.
It includes:
Benedict Cumberbatch: irritating, lefty, self-hating Old Harrovian mummer.
Rufus Hound: magisterially unfunny comedian, would-be Labour MEP who argued, in all seriousness, on telly recently that the government was planning to sell the NHS to Tory party donors while telling the poor to “go fuck yourself.”
JK Rowling: Labour-supporting author of The Casual Vacancy
Richard Curtis: director of eco-fascist snuff video No Pressure and also the three worst films ever made.
Alan Hollinghurst: author who writes loads about gay stuff, like we care.
Terry Jones: the totally unfunny one out of Monty Python, though he’s OK on Medieval history
Ben Elton: famous in the Eighties for wearing a spangly suit and saying “Thatch” a lot.
Polly Toynbee: Tuscan property owner, plutocrat
Bianca Jagger: once married to someone famous
Professor Richard Dawkins: or “Dorkins” as God nicknames him because He hates him.
Gary Lineker: does crisp adverts
Sir David Attenborough: gorilla-bothering Malthusian
Salman Rushdie: apparently thinks the solution to press freedom in Britain is to make it a bit more like Iran’s.
This time last year the editor of The Spectator Fraser Nelson dedicated his cover – NO! – and lead article to explaining why his magazine would not have anything to do with the new “voluntary” Royal Charter press regulation.
It goes, almost without saying, that we here at Breitbart London are of the same view a) because this regulation is intrusive, constricting and entirely against the principles of free speech which generations of Englishmen from Milton and Wilkes onwards have fought so hard to establish and b) because unlike the names on the list, we are not a bunch of abject, weapons-grade wankers.