6 February 2025 - 10:00am
I suppose there never was a golden age when actors avoided politics entirely. John Wayne offered enthusiastic support to anti-communist campaigns in post-war Hollywood. Marlon Brando sent a fake Native American to the 1973 Oscars to collect his Best Actor award.
But it does seem like celebrity interventions in politics have become both more frequent and more absurd over the last few years. The best recent example of this was Idris Elba’s suggestion on Radio 4’s Today programme that kitchen knives should be sold without a pointed end to avoid them being used to stab people. This came after Elba’s new BBC documentary. And only a week later, this bizarre idea appears to have been taken up by the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper.
The pipeline from “person on TV with a bee in their bonnet” to actual policy proposal has already seen some use in this Parliament. In October Keir Starmer justified his support for a vote on assisted suicide by noting that he’d promised such a vote to Esther Rantzen before the general election.
You can see why politicians are always keen to jump on a passing celebrity bandwagon, or make use of celebrities to popularise their own proposals. For good or ill, we are a celebrity culture. People look to performers of various kinds, and other prominent people, for moral and political leadership. If the Duchess of Cambridge wears a particular dress, it sells out in a day or two. If YouTube influencers talk about some issue, it genuinely does help to push that issue into the mainstream. Of course politicians — who tend to have little charisma and are regarded as generally unreliable — will want to take advantage of the ready-made trust that people place in entertainers to generate enthusiasm for their schemes.
It’s also true that the simplistic solutions offered by celebrities who imagine themselves to have some brilliant insight into public affairs tend to be those which tug on the heartstrings. Modern politicians are not, on the whole, comfortable with making principled philosophical arguments about matters of importance. We saw this in spades in the recent House of Commons debate over assisted suicide. The speeches were heavily reliant on personal anecdotes and appeals to difficult individual circumstances, rather than considerations of higher principles or the unforeseen and unintended consequences of such a seismic change.
Sadly, our political leaders fight shy of the more sober-minded and reflective approach that was common not so very long ago — if you doubt this, read pre-1997 Hansard, or watch political interviews from the 1970s — and therefore rely more heavily on moral credibility accumulated by singers and soap stars.
It’s hard to know what might be done to fix this situation. The incentives for celebrities to use their status to push simplistic fashionable causes are now enormous. The old joke was that politics is showbiz for ugly people. Let’s hope that showbiz doesn’t entirely turn into politics for beautiful people.
