Actor and anti-Brexit campaigner Hugh Grant believes Britain is “finished” after Boris Johnson’s election win ensured Britain’s departure from the European Union.
“I know that a few weeks ago you were campaigning,” an interviewer from the Associated Press asked Grant as part of his media tour for The Gentlemen.
“I’m just wondering, how are you feeling now that everything is kinda settled? Are you encouraged any?”
“No, it’s a catastrophe,” replied the ageing heartthrob, without a hint of levity.
“So no bright line, or horizon–”
“No,” Grant cut in curtly.
“No, no — country’s finished.”
The interviewer’s reference to Grant’s own campaigning in the December 2019 snap election may have proven something of a sore spot.
The multi-millionaire toured a number of constituencies as part of an anti-Brexit “tactical voting” stratagem, saying he believed the United Kingdom was “on the edge of a true abyss”.
He backed candidates for Jeremy Corbyn’s far-left Labour Party, the globalist-progressive Liberal Democrats, and independents such as Dominic Grieve, the former Tory attorney-general who masterminded a number of parliamentary plots to sabotage the Brexit process while Boris Johnson and predecessor Theresa May led minority administrations.
Every single one of Grant’s candidates lost their seats.
Grant’s description of Brexit as a “catastrophe” is somewhat ironic, given Love Actually, the film for which he is most famous, was described in the same terms by its writer-director, Richard Curtis.
In it, Grant played an ineffectual, lickspittle prime minister who finally finds some backbone when seeing the U.S. President flirting with a female employee he had been lusting after sends him into a fit of jealousy.
He has played a number of similarly bumbling upper-middle-class lotharios throughout his career — although his off-screen love life has often proved somewhat less picturesque, with a high-profile long-term relationship with star actress Liz Hurley beginning to unravel after an incident with a prostitute on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard resulted in a “lewd conduct in a public place” conviction.
Ms Hurley, interestingly, does not suffer from what Grant’s detractors have described as his “Brexit Derangement Syndrome” — with the actress being a staunch supporter of Brexit and an admirer of Brexiteer-in-Chief Nigel Farage.