Greetings, pop pickers – and you are cordially welcomed to an exciting new Lost in showbiz series. It is entitled You’re Wetting Your Pants About What Now?, and aims to showcase the pettier preoccupations of the far right/radical right/whatever the free-speech snowflakes are demanding to be called this week. Now, you’d think these guys have a lot of big things to talk about. The clash of civilisations. The White House putsch. The fact you can’t say anything any more, even though they literally just said whatever it was. But it’s amazing how often the leading lights of wingnuttery become obsessed with sensationally trivial things.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest You want to say: Dude, it’s great that you left your flat.’ Paul Joseph Watson.

Only the other week, I saw Infowars starlet Paul Joseph Watson getting really upset about a temporary floating sculpture on the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park. Poor Prison Plonker! On the one hand, you want to say: Dude, it’s great that you left your flat. It always feels to me like you’re 10 minutes off hiring a chief of staff, and I think that fresh air is a big part of staving off that inevitable moment.

On the other hand: I’m sorry the sculpture hurt your feelings. But it’s just art. It can’t harm you. You don’t have to like it – not at all – but it’s going to be gone in a month or so, and you can still use the pedalos while it’s there. (Although, can you not go on them this weekend, because I’m going with my children. And whilst I’m mostly amused at the thought of them shouting: “THAT ISLAND’S LIKE ABNEY AND TEAL’S ISLAND!” while we drift past you shouting into your GoPro camera about men’s rights, it might be a bit worlds-colliding for me to handle while I’m pedalling.)

What do you care what colour James Bond is? YOU PLAY FOR SPECTRE

But back to You’re Wetting Your Pants About What Now? Guess what this week’s big-wedge issue on the far right is. Is it some notional attack by “antifa” (ie anyone who disagrees with them)? Is it the hundreds of US news organisations opposing Donald Trump’s attacks on the press? No! It’s who might or might not play a pretend person in a movie. James Bond, to be precise, which in its current iteration is essentially a franchise about a man who has to have sex with as many beautiful women as he can in the world’s leading spa hotels. It’s like the Condé Nast Traveller version of Pokémon Go. But sexy, and with GCHQ top notes. And when the actor gets interviewed about it afterwards, they have to come off like the job’s slightly more gruelling than the Shackleton expedition.

Anyway, news that Idris Elba is back in favour for the role is turning out to be one of the major plotlines in the twatosphere this week. Not only has Katie Hopkins made a video about it – more on that later – but American white supremacist Richard Spencer has devoted a lengthy and thundering tweetstorm (tweetsturm?) to it.

I know what you’re thinking. Is the Fourth Reich actually here? Are all the institutions of a fully realised neo-Nazi utopia in place? Because if I were a white supremacist, I’d want to know every last person who didn’t seem like me had been rounded up before I saw my thought leader spending ONE SECOND of time having a view on who might play the lead role in a sexy spy movie. If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a thousand times: it’s Lebensraum first, THEN you get around to having a view on who plays laser iPhones with Q.

But we are where we are. For reasons which are really a matter for a trainee psychoanalyst, who plays James Bond is a big thing for Spencer. To this end, he has unleashed a series of thoughts so bovine that I’ll just give you one for a little flavour. “Make no mistake,” begins one of Richard’s mistakes, “a black James Bond would be an act of dispossession far greater than a flotilla of a million refugees.”

OK … Aside from everything else – and there is a lot there – I can’t believe I’ve got to explain the absolute basics of the James Bond franchise to Richard Spencer. This thing really couldn’t be simpler or less opaque. It makes Jason Statham movies look like Mulholland Drive.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Honking into the void somewhere in Devon.’ Katie Hopkins. Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA

Still, here goes: Richard? Richard??? What do you care what colour James Bond is? James Bond isn’t even on your team! YOU PLAY FOR SPECTRE, YES? If you’re not sure how your values align with those of that organisation, and not with those of say, Judi ruddy Dench, then let me help you. You believe democracy is a “passing fad”. You believe in highly non-mainstream world domination. And here’s the dead giveaway – Spectre is packed with actual Nazis! Blofeld literally sold secrets to the Third Reich. These. Are. Your. People.

You know who isn’t your guy? Some elitist one-percenter in an Yves Saint Laurent dinner jacket who can’t go 50 miles in a high-performance sports car without shagging the help. How are you going to sell that to your incels? We all saw the footage from the Charlottesville rally – no sex is absolutely part of your side of the brand.

Be honest, Richard. How do you see Bond working as a tiki-torchbearer for you lot? Let’s just stick a pin in the first reel of Skyfall, and try to picture one of your guys in the role. “Oh I’m sorry, I’m going to be unable to have sex with you in the shower of this seven-star Macau casino because a) I don’t like the look of Macau and b) Owing to what I believe to be a gland issue I feel self-conscious when I remove my buttoned-up white polo shirt and outsize pleat-front chinos.”

Why interviewing Richard Spencer was a risk worth taking | Gary Younge Read more

Sorry, Richard, but at that point you’ve just lost the hard drive with the details of MI6’s entire undercover agent programme. Idris would have got the hard drive. He’d have had done what was expected of him in the shower (and done it well), then decoded some complicated cyberterrorism whatnot and relayed the breakdown of it back to London. Then sauntered off to have it out with Javier Bardem on that island that looks a bit like my flat after a Christmas party. I don’t see one of your lot getting it done, Richard. Waa waa waa, people are trying to replace us. Waa waa waa, can we stop for Cheetos.

As for Katie Hopkins’s contribution to this absolute keystone of a debate, her video. What to say about this effort? As a filmmaker, she’s very like Leni Riefenstahl, except talentless and presumably filming in her garage. The production values are slightly lower than you might expect if you pressed record while your phone was in your pocket. It opens with Katie declaring: “No, Idris Elba, you cannot be James Bond” – an assertion to which the only response is: pretty sure that’s going to be up to Barbara Broccoli, not someone honking into the void somewhere in Devon.

But clearly, there is a much bigger issue here. Namely, what is the point – WHAT IS THE POINT – of making a Bond-related alt-right video if you don’t use this golden opportunity to do a pastiche of Nancy Sinatra’s You Only Live Twice theme? It is the most open of all open goals. Think about it. Soaring strings. Cue titles. And then Katie’s voice warbling: “You own the libs twice …” Fine, I apologise for the fact that you’re going to have that as an earworm for the rest of the day. But honestly. HOW DID SHE MISS?