Oh, great. Another article about him. You know who I’m talking about. The fuzzy-haired boil on the back of British politics, the walking indictment of the British class system, the bumbling consequence of decades of a lazy media implicitly trusting the poshest person in the room, the sentient sack of potatoes whose political highpoint was getting stuck on a zipline during the London Olympics.

I’m so tired of hearing he’s 'broadening the debate' when he's just an old Etonian doing an impression of a cabbie

Yes, this is yet another article where someone expresses outrage about the putrid racist nonsense that that red-faced goon spewed out, like so many gallons of port in a Bullingdon Club vomitorium. And I’m sorry if it’s tedious to read more outrage. I’ll have you know it’s fairly tedious to have to write it too. I’d much rather be making quirky observations about the heatwave, or maybe a wry listicle about what Steven Seagal and Vladimir Putin get up to in the Kremlin (spoiler: it’s 90% wrestling, 10% baldness tips). But I don’t get to.



Why? Because in 2018, a former foreign secretary is parroting racist tropes about Muslim women in a national newspaper. And the discourse dictates that if I don’t express outrage – if I don’t keep participating in this damn screaming match between dog-whistle racists determined to make the same bad-faith arguments based on stuff they’ve gleaned from Reddit and Alex Jones videos on one side, and reasonable, exhausted people on the other – then the scruffy lumpbag of Mr Toad soundbites wins.

But I’m so tired of wasting my anger on him. I’m so tired of listening to faux-impassioned defences of him by a smarmy army of hot-take media types like Julia Hartley-Brewer.

I’m so tired of hearing them say he’s somehow “broadening the debate”, as if the only way to hear working-class voices is to get an old Etonian to do a lazy impression of what he imagines a cabbie sounds like.

I’m so tired of pointing out the hypocrisy of rightwing commentators, who will happily ignore the rights of women in debates about abortion or austerity while simultaneously pretending to be a beacon of liberalism for Muslim women by banning the burqa.

I’m so tired of these people dressing up their bigotry as something noble, as if it’s an important debate to be had, as if we don’t have the same Islamophobic screaming match every six months. The result is always the same: each time another wave of outrage, each time a backlash to the outrage, and each time the liberal values of our society erode just that little bit more, so that the next time the “debate” comes around, the Islamophobia has been normalised by “mainstream” politicians and commentators.

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In this age of anger, we forget that it’s precious. It’s a commodity, and he wants you to spend it on him. He wants that anger to dominate the newswaves, he wants the whole country to throb with fury at the very mention of his name, he wants to be the first name on the Today programme, and the last punchline on Mock the Week. He thrives on it. Look at his career - it was built on being insulted and mocked, but we all realised too late that he was in on the joke.



Now that the joke is over and the laughter has stopped, he’s doing what all bad comics do – trying to shock his audience into a reaction. He’s not “saying what we’re all thinking” or exercising his free speech. He’s testing the water. He’s dividing his audience in two, working out where their loyalties lie, with decent society or with him. Our anger fuels him. He can point it out to his base as proof that he’s getting things done, that he’s making the right people angry – even though it’s a substitute for policies, for ideas, for any basic understanding of how this country can survive. He’s using that outrage to define himself and to make himself relevant because there is nothing of substance there – just a caricature of a man that some of us found funny on a panel show in 2004.

He doesn’t deserve outrage: outrage should be reserved for people who are capable of change, of shame, who don’t wear condemnation as a badge of pride. He doesn’t deserve to set the terms of the debate, to spark off another round of Islamophobia masquerading as legitimate concerns. Frankly, he doesn’t deserve respect, given how little of it he’s showing to the Muslim community right now.

He deserves to be forgotten, reduced to an insignificant scuff on the tapestry of British history. He won’t be, obviously – we’ve spent enough fury on him up to this point that his name has been gouged in there already. But let’s not give him any more of the attention that he so desperately craves. Spend your outrage elsewhere. Let’s try to forget his name. Whatever it is.