Twitter: no country for old men

As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now there’s a sentence that straddles a generation gap. Many people very familiar with John Cleese will have only the dimmest idea of what ‘cancelled’ means; while people who are all about cancelling celebrities will tend not to know what ‘John Cleese’ means. If anything saves him from cancellation, it will be the hope that he can snuggle down and hide in that gap until it’s all over. The cancellers won’t try too hard because they didn’t know who he was in the first place; others will register the row, furrow their brows, and then be distracted by chortling merrily at the thought of Basil Fawlty going to work on his 1967 Austin Countryman with a large tree-branch.

What has he done? He has Said Something On Twitter. ‘Some years ago I opined that London was not really an English city any more,’ he wrote. ‘Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation. So there must be some truth in it…’ His problem, obviously, was that in failing to define ‘not English’ he laid himself open to accusations of racism: did he mean, as many assumed, it was full of brown people? This he denied, saying he was being not racist but ‘culturalist’, and making some scattershot but pointed remarks about FGM, knife crime, political correctness and Russian money laundering.

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Eliot Wilson

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What strikes the casual observer is not the strength or weakness of his argument —there’s not much of an argument there, and he muddles cultural and institutional issues — but his perplexity that people can’t just see what he means. Why is everyone determined to take offence? Everyone understands what English means, don’t they? Something to do with warm beer and cricket and fair play and queues and Anglicanism, presumably; all those things whose traditional association with whiteness is incidental.