The only time I have seen a celebrity in the flesh was on Cambridge’s Trumpington Street. I had gone to the bank one Saturday lunchtime to withdraw cash and on returning to my college, there, walking towards me, was the tall, expansive figure of Stephen Fry. As one who had laughed along with millions of others at Fry’s pompous Lord Melchett and his boorish descendant, General Melchett, in the Blackadder comedies, I recognised him and did a double-take. Fry noticed, of course, and gave me a gentle, ironic smile, affirming it was indeed him. I remember smiling back sheepishly and hurrying on, determined not to disturb his privacy. On reflection, I regret not speaking to him. I am sure he would have stopped to chat.
That was over thirty years ago and since then, Fry has established himself as the nearest England has ever had to Oscar Wilde’s original wit and lavish verbal dexterity. He was therefore the perfect choice to present The Alternative Christmas Message on Channel 4 in which a celebrity discusses a topic too controversial for the monarch’s speech. The audience must have wondered with pleasurable anticipation what verbal feast the great comic was going to serve up.
What they got was not Fry’s polished yet pointed irony, but a solemn homily on his being a Jew and his concern at the eruption of anti-Semitism in Britain since the pogrom of 7 October. In the manner of one’s favourite schoolmaster (the one who can talk for an hour and no one becomes bored), Fry set out the unsettling, hard facts. Since that blood-soaked day back in October, there have been fifty anti-Semitic incidents daily in London which amounts to an astonishing 1,350 per cent increase. Fry condemned the verbal and physical violence meted out to Britain’s Jews and reminded his audience that Britain is renowned for its values of fairness and decency. To maintain his message’s balance, he also damned all racism and deplored both Hamas’ barbarism and the Israeli government’s killing of Gazan citizens. With a touch of justifiable sentimentality, Fry appealed to his audience as ‘brothers and sisters’ who have no business persecuting each other.
There was nothing in what the beige-jumpered, tea-sipping Fry said that should have caused offence, but Britain is no longer the nation it once was. A tsunami of abuse has been the response which neatly proves Fry’s point. Single brain-celled lefties, ignorant of the fact or choosing to ignore that Fry is left of centre himself, could manage nothing more original on X (formerly Twitter) than to call Fry a ‘cunt.’ One with a little more imagination tapped into the Nazi stereotype of the wealthy, wicked Jew by posting a photograph of Fry in an expensive suit juxtaposed with an injured Palestinian child. Predictably, conspiracy theorists who appear to have read nothing other than Mein Kampf have played their part too by averring that Fry and his producers are agents of a tentacular ‘Israel lobby’ that is eager to control the West by subverting its institutions. Fry was criticised also for conflating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, but in the light of the pathological obsession on the part of Islamists and their left-wing apologists to demonise Israel, it seems that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have indeed coalesced.
What perhaps riled Fry’s critics most is that he exposed their hypocrisy. Many in Channel 4’s audience for whom equity, diversity and inclusion are a secular Trinity, have been outed as selective racists. They will vituperate Islamophobia, applaud the vandals of Black Lives Matter and if they are white, denounce themselves as trash, but when it comes to attacks on Jews and their property, they have nothing to say. As Fry rightly opined in his speech, anti-Semitism remains the one acceptable form of prejudice within polite society.
Fry’s appeal to British people as brothers and sisters is his belief that most people in Britain can get along regardless of differences in their ethnic and cultural heritages. I agree. However, as historians of the Third Reich point out, most people in Thirties’ Germany were not anti-Semitic or were not anti-Semitic enough to approve of Hitler’s Final Solution. Yet it was the majority’s inaction that allowed the fanatical minority to massacre Jews. Decency is not enough when Islamist and left-wing anti-Semites are invading Britain’s streets and there is a recrudescence of far-right Judeophobia. It is therefore time to write letters of protest to MPs, sign petitions, cancel television licences and newspaper subscriptions, demand that police commissioners investigate their police force’s track record on arresting anti-Semites, and join counter-demonstrations. It is time to do this for Britain’s Jews and for people as lovable (or not) as Stephen Fry.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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Sorry, no, Fry is the enemy – woke and even worse a celebrity ‘vaxx pusher’.
“The only time I have seen a celebrity in the flesh was on Cambridge’s Trumpington Street.”
Wow. Larf. Talking of Trumpington Street, that celebrity the late wonderful Baroness Trumpington, was my headmaster’s wife at the Leys School in the 1960s. Wonderful woman
Other celebrities I have clocked
J. Arthur Rank – presented a projector to the theatre at The Leys – Methodist school, and he a Methodist
David Hockney – Carfax in Oxford
Alex Guinness – the same, the day after my ex and I had seen him at the Playhouse.
Borges – got to shake his hand after a reading of his works in Oxford.
Harold MacMillan, in a wheelchair at the annual Encaenia, at St. Catz, my college.
You must have seen more!
Hello Jeremy. I am afraid I have seen no more celebrities than Stephen Fry. I have led a sheltered life! By the way, Catz was my college too.
One of the few times I have seen a celebrity in the flesh was on Cambridge’s Trumpington Street. I had gone to gone to lunch one weekday and on returning to my lab, there, climbing out of a sports car with his two boys, was the tall, slim figure of Hugh Laurie.
Laurie is the more gifted of the two, I’d say. Fry can be an awful bore.