Laurence Fox interview: is he for real?

In politics, there is always a place for mavericks, and Laurence Fox is a maverick. His supporters say he is also a brave man in these chilling times, having dared to challenge some of the dominant nostrums of contemporary progressive thinking, most obviously on race and free speech. However rashly, he has even rejected the conventional wisdom that lockdowns, masks and social distancing are necessary tools in the struggle to defeat Covid-19. 

But is he mad on masks and might he just be misreading the new cultural revolution, Black Lives Matter and all? Has he allowed his aversion to political correctness to blind him to certain uncomfortable truths that must be addressed if post-imperial, now post-Brexit and post-racial, Britain is to come together as a nation? 

Finally, and unavoidably, is it possible that as a scion of the Fox acting dynasty headed by his father James and his uncle Edward and with the backing of the wealthy arch-Brexiteer businessman Jeremy Hosking, he has simply vaulted his way onto the political stage and is being carried along by the exuberance of his own verbosity? 

The jury is out but will return an interim verdict on 6 May. For Fox, at the age of 42, has formed his own political party, Reclaim, and is standing against Labour’s Sadiq Khan to be mayor of London. He won’t win. He is unlikely to come second, or even third. But he is attracting a deal of attention in the media, not just in the UK, but in America. 

Until 17 January last year, Fox was best known to most ordinary Britons as Detective Sergeant Hathaway in the long-running ITV drama “Lewis,” in which he assumed the role of a languid Cambridge graduate of “good family”, acting as a foil to the gruff, far-Northern Inspector Lewis, played by the much-loved Kevin Whately. 

But then Something Happened. He was invited to appear on the BBC’s Question Time where he let rip with the full range of his opinions and was accused by a bi-racial woman in the audience of being a “white, privileged male”. Fox refused to give ground. He was who and what he had been born, he said, and it was not he who was a racist, but she. 

Cue national uproar. For the next several days, Fox was hounded by liberals, embraced by the populist right. He could have drawn back and, after a period of silence, returned to acting. Instead, he went on to form Reclaim, which he claims has attracted a membership of 35,000 bent on refreshing the parts of Britain that other parties, including the Tories, cannot reach. 

Interviewing him on Zoom, I find him open and relaxed – charming, you’d have to say – and ever-so-slightly dishevelled, putting me in mind of an older, careworn Tintin, with a beard that has yet to make up its mind about how it wants to end up. On the wall behind him, instead of the bookcases that are the standard backdrop of online debate, are framed playbills and family photos, including a poster for the “scandalous” 1971 film Performance in which his dad starred alongside Mick Jagger. He looks to be exhausted from days on the hustings and the relentless probings of journalists chasing down a story. 

I get straight to the point. London belongs to Sadiq Khan. It is his city: Sadiq Central. While there are many Londoners who look back fondly on the Boris years, the current mayor’s coalition is strong. So what, in practical terms, does he hope to achieve?

“I think you can change these things around,” he begins, running his fingers through his Covid-length locks. “There is a large proportion of the population who are saying they don’t know who to vote for. People are walking away from the Tories in droves at the moment, certainly over the culture stuff – though they’re very pleased about the vaccine. But I think the most important thing is to provide a voice for the voiceless – those that are being frightened into submission by the authoritarian, morally supremacist woke brigade.” 

He is buoyed up by the findings of the Independent Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities set up last year by the prime minister, which concluded last week, controversially, that there was – or is no longer – institutional racism in the UK. 

Unmoved by the trenchant criticism of the report by black and Asian rights groups, he says it endorses exactly what he said on Question Time, that Britain is not a systemically racist country. “The usual suspects on the divisive side of the argument are berating and shouting and screaming their ‘facts’ on social media. But this is a very solid report with a very diverse (for want of a better word) panel.” 

Warming to his theme, he describes the aim of the Black Lives Matter movement as, “self-statingly, to undermine western democracy and family values and things that hold our society together in the United Kingdom.” He is against it and will oppose it at every turn, no matter how long it takes. “We all, bar a few, vile racists, totally agree that black lives matter, but you cannot have a nation unless you unite around a shared set of values.” 

Fox’s career as an actor means that his work until recently was intimately bound up with role-play. In taking on Sadiq Khan, has he assumed the role of a political firebrand, I ask, or is this the real Laurence Fox? 

It is a cheap jibe that elicits a thin smile, as though he has dispensed with this business many times before. “I don’t know why I would have swapped a well-paid, cushy life as an actor unless I thought there was a serious problem that needed to be addressed and dealt with. I don’t really find acting that helpful, annoyingly. As far as going back to it is concerned, there’s not much on television that I really miss not being in. In that sense, I’ve been very lucky in the last year or so since I jacked it in or had it jacked in for me.” 

He doesn’t say so, but his reference here is to the fact that since his political views went public he has been fired by two sets of theatrical agents and blackballed by the actors’ union, Equity – though the latter was later forced to withdraw its criticism of him as “a disgrace to our profession” and to issue a public apology. 

“Art is so boringly monochromatic these days. I don’t see anything pushing back against the prevailing culture in art or movies that I’ve managed to see in the last year. I think that politics has probably taken over from art as the place that is challenging the false orthodoxies.” 

His appearance on Question Time, he says, was like treading on a land mine that had exploded and sent him flying off in new directions. But, back in one piece, unlike, say, young George in Blackadder Goes Forth, he considers himself fortunate in the way that things have turned out.

Okay, but why the Reclaim route? Why not just throw in his lot with the Tories? After all, he’s a posh boy. His father, like Laurence himself, is an Old Harrovian and a former officer in the Coldstream Guards. Uncle Ed is a keen Brexiteer and fox-hunting man (no pun intended), and his cousin Lucy is Viscountess Gormanston. 

“If the Tory Party was conservative, I would get involved with them. But they’re not, so I can’t. No one is engaging with the cultural capture. The Conservatives aren’t doing it, Labour have no interest. Yet, apart from Covid, it’s the most pressing issue in the UK.” 

But can the war against wokery ever be won without big party backing? Fox seems unphased by the prospect of a long march to freedom. “You lose and you lose and you lose again – and then you win,” he says. 

In recent days, as he ramps up his mayoral challenge, he has met, or confronted, Londoners of all persuasions, some of whom no doubt regard him as the last man they would like to see in City Hall. His message – “they should police your streets, not your tweets” – is something of a call to arms to both sides. So how have Londoners responded? Do they share his Gumpian view that history is not a box of chocolates, to be sampled or rejected depending on preference?

“It depends on the age group. The very woke crowd that have been to university and were taught this nation-building ideology along with the new religion of wokery are very difficult to talk to. They’re never wrong and they will ad hominem attack you if you disagree with them. But the younger generation, they don’t want to be miserable millennials, so they’re much more affable and appreciative.” 

Fox says he has been “burrowing around for a long time,” trying to work out what the basis is for a good, tolerant western society. And he has come to the conclusion that it all hinges on freedom of speech and equality under the law. “Without freedom of speech, you get what we have now, which is no debate over lockdowns, no debate over Covid policy, no debate over whether we’re a systemically racist country or not. It’s turned into a huge, divided struggle. If you allow freedom of speech, you get the broadest possible debate and everyone gets to be heard. And with the broadest possible discourse, you get better government policy.” 

He agrees that today’s civil discords are a digital echo of the 1960s, with peace and love replaced by demands for an almost Maoist process of social and political revolution. 

“In the sixties it was fine, because (the protesters) didn’t own the institutions. They didn’t own education. It’s a much more difficult battle today. Now the kids are telling their teachers what they want to be taught. But Britain and the West have been under attack before. It didn’t take many people to get in a room and work out how to resist Fascism in 1939. It was a few people saying this was a major problem and we have to stand up against it. So I’m very confident. I’m not going to stop fighting them. Someone has to stop them because otherwise we might just as well give up on our country.” 

As he speaks, he reveals the back of his right hand, tattooed (a legacy of his marriage to the actress Billie Piper) with the word “Freedom”. But how far should freedom extend? Should citizens be free, for example, to ignore government instructions to wear a mask during a pandemic. Is the motto of his movement to be “Give me liberty and give me death”? 

A genial shake of the head. “I think if there was any evidence that lockdowns were effective, I would take it on board. But there seems to be quite a lot of evidence that they’re not. In terms of mask mandates, I just don’t think that covering your face with a bit of dirty cloth is going to do anything other than make you ill. But that’s me,” he says.

“If there’d been a debate, great. But there wasn’t. It was mandated. When we discover the true cost of these lockdowns, which is going to start coming into our vision in the next few years, we will look back on this period of lending our government our liberties as possibly the worst decision we ever made as a society.” 

For Fox, the fourth horseman of the Wokepocalypse, riding alongside Black Lives Matter, Cancel Culture and MeToo, is, of course, Climate Change. And here, too, his views will surprise no one. 

“What we need,” he tells me as he deftly rolls a cigarette, is a more balanced view. “The alarmists – the doomsday cultists – who say the world is going to end in 11 years … I got spun that yarn as well when I was a kid at school. The point is that of course there’s man-made climate change. The question is, are we doing what we can to mitigate it? In the UK, we’ve signed up to the Paris climate accords to the tune of £50 billion a year to go carbon-neutral by 2030. There’s an argument to say, could that £50bn be spent on something else.” 

He lights his cigarette, speaking now through a faint haze of smoke. “Climate modelling is very, very difficult to do because the margin of error, if you get it a little bit wrong, expands exponentially. So I don’t think anyone truly knows what’s happening, and in that case I would be more cautious. I’d say, let’s do everything we can for the planet, let’s focus on it, but let’s not do it at the cost of everything else.” 

Greta Thunberg, eat your heart out.  

It seems unlikely that Sadiq Khan, still less Greta Thunberg, will debate Fox in the course of the London campaign. But it would be an explosive match-up, like matter and anti-matter existing in the same space. Sadiq, as a more lawyerly Robespierre, constrained by due process, would find himself up against a would-be John Wilkes with everything to gain and nothing left to lose. It would be Ernest Bevin College and University of North London versus Harrow (expelled) and RADA: high drama, full of sound and fury, signifying … the United Kingdom in 2021.

I neglect to mention that the April edition of the adult comic Viz features Lozza in a competition to find which is the most fantastic Fox – him, former Page-Three girl Samantha or retired footballer Ruel. Sam scores well for her “ample charms,” and midfielder Ruel’s impressive dribbling keeps him in the race. But in the end Laurence Fox romps home on the strength of his anti-masks crusade, having crushed the “dangerous propaganda” of so-called NHS experts, apparently.