Actor Laurence Fox is standing for election as Mayor of London. Quite what chance he’ll have against the brutal election machine of incumbent Sadiq Khan is hard to say. But even if Fox doesn’t succeed it will have been worth it just for this brilliant, inspirational campaign video.
All right, so Fox is an actor – best known, before the world of Luvviedom cancelled him for WrongSpeak, for his role as DS Hathaway in the long-running detective series Lewis – and can convincingly recite a script in one take while walking at the same time. But while the style is a lot more polished than you’d get from almost any politician, what really sets this video apart is the content.
Right. Here we go.
It’s been a strange twelve months in which we’ve give up so many of our personal freedoms in the name of the common good. Now whether you agree or disagree with how things have been handled the one thing that we can agree on is that we find ourselves here now, today. Not tomorrow and not yesterday, thank God, today. So what are you going to do?
Well, I am going to stand to be Mayor of this beautiful city that stands at the heart of this warm, welcoming and tolerant nation. Why? Well, I want to reclaim your freedom. I want to reclaim your freedom to work when you want to work, where you want to work and how you want to work and remove all the obstacles that stand between you and rebuilding after these lockdowns. And I want to reclaim your freedom to move. To be with whoever you want to be with and when you want to be with them. Your fundamental human need to be together.
In sickness and in health. And to never take that freedom away again. Nobody should say their last goodbyes to anybody on an iPad ever again.
And importantly I want to reclaim your freedom to speak, to be yourself, to be part of the national conversation, to cherish your history rather than rewrite it. And to teach our children to be confident, not ashamed of who they are or where they’ve come from.
London is one of the most diverse cities on earth. Millions of unique and individual voices, a celebration of collaboration. And it is only by working together that we will shape a better tomorrow. So in the coming weeks, I will reveal a common sense plan to get London moving again and restore your freedoms.
It’s your life, your freedom. Reclaim it.
Sure, some of the fluffy stuff about diversity and tolerance is the usual political pabulum.
But the absolute key moment for me is that killer line:
Nobody should say their last goodbyes to anybody on an iPad ever again.
It’s powerful, it’s angry and it’s true. How many elderly people in the last nightmarish twelve months have died miserable and alone, forbidden from spending their final year in the company of those they love?
Almost nothing, it seems to me, embodies the callousness and cruelty of Boris Johnson’s dreadful government quite so much as this: the fact that it has legitimised – indeed legally enforced, even to the point of police brutality – the kind of behaviour which for most of the history of the human race would have been unthinkable. Family have been forbidden from seeing family; friends from seeing friends; the dying from being consoled in their last moments.
“On some fond breast the parting soul relies”, wrote Thomas Gray, in his Elegy, Written in a Country Churchyard.
For many, it’s the greatest poem ever written because it goes to the heart of so much of the meaning of life and death and the fragility and poignancy of existence.
Of course the dying need the comfort of the living. How could anyone allow it to be otherwise?
Yet the likes of Mad ‘Messiah Complex’ Matt Hancock, Priapic Malthusian Boris Johnson, and Michael ‘Conscience? What Conscience?’ Gove have driven in a bulldozer right over all that. Almost everything that makes life worth living they have conspired to destroy in the space of a year – insisting all the while that they’re doing it for our own good and for that of “Our NHS” (which apparently we all love more than life itself).
And where have been the politicians to call all this out? I would be a lot more impressed with Nigel Farage — who today has announced his retirement from politics — if he’d spoken up against this arbitrary tyranny more often than he did, rather than clapping for the NHS and praising the sinister and despicable Tony Blair and his vaccine programme.
So far as I can see, about the only ones speaking out on this issue are the lonely brave Conservative Sir Charles Walker MP, Fox’s fellow mayoral candidate David Kurten (interviewed here), and now Fox himself.
I know why, too. There is massive pressure from forces you might call the Deep State – from the corrupt and useless mainstream media, from Big Tech, from Big Pharma from the World Economic Forum, from higher regions of finance, etc – for more lockdowns, more enforced mask-wearing, more restrictions on freedom of movement. Politicians who refuse to push this totalitarian agenda soon find themselves isolated and denied media support and airtime.
Fox is a brave, decent man and I wish him all the best. He’s going to need it.
James Delingpole is the host of the Delingpod podcast. You can support him on Patreon and Subscribestar.
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