The bus named Laurence Fox is parked outside Waitrose in Harrow, idling in exquisite metaphor: a new assault on, or corrective to, conventional politics, called Reclaim. The man Laurence Fox wears a long sort of cashmere bat cape and is surrounded by advisors. They are older than he, and male, which explains the bat cape. They don’t know that it is not relatable, but he is a trained actor: he seeks a costume. He is tall and gaunt, and he seems uneasy and distracted. We drive to the party stall on a necrotic shopping street. Most of the few volunteers are female, old to young, a piano scale. They look coyly excited. He eyes a younger one. “Aye-aye” he says. (He knows.) “We’ve been using pears as paper-weights,” she explains, indicating pears on leaflets, but the stall is in a wind tunnel, and the leaflets scatter.
Fox is famous for two reasons: because, on Question Time in January 2020, as the novelty fifth guest, he called a black woman a racist for calling him a “white, privileged male”. “It’s so easy to just throw your charge of racism at everybody and it’s starting to get boring now,” he said. He seemed filled with anger, and he could not stop. The same month he called the appearance of a Sikh soldier in the film 1917 “forcing diversity” but Sikhs, it was pointed out, did fight on the Western Front. It was race baiting. He apologised, but he seemed aggrieved.
The second reason is the insatiable desire of British people to watch the murder of Oxford dons. He played Sergeant James Hathaway of Thames Valley Police in Lewis, the successor to Inspector Morse, for nine seasons. Beyond this, his work on film is thin. Few directors have exploited his anger, and that is why he is here. I have watched every episode of Lewis, and Hathaway is the most interesting character by default. He is a sometime Christian, an occasional intellectual, and a committed depressive. Fox’s acting career is summarised as a Inspector Morse tribute.
Fox’s internal motivations are not so clear, but he has not had nine seasons to reveal them. His father, the superb actor James Fox — the best in a dynasty of actors — fled drama for a decade for a Christian cult. Was Laurence, when playing Hathaway, playing his father James? The only thing he tells me about his family is that they tease him. A burglary at his home was caught on CCTV and they mocked his appearance in the video for not being convincing enough. He suffered at Harrow School, where he was expelled before his A levels for a sexual misdemeanour, which ended his chances of university. He worked as a gardener, applied to RADA and appeared as an aristocrat in Gosford Park and a fascist in Foyle’s War. He was married to and acrimoniously divorced from the actor Billie Piper, with whom he shares two sons. At the end of season nine of Lewis, he walked away in a long, black coat, not to a series of his own but to this, and it is sillier, sadder, and infinitely riskier.
He is more courteous in life than on Twitter, but he could hardly fail to be, and that makes me distrust him. There, he uses the phrase “All Lives Matter” and incites others to break lockdown rules to combat authoritarianism, which he claims to fear while dressing, sometimes, in quasi-military dress. He is at heart a chaos-maker and for this he was given £5 million in funding, mostly from former Tory donors, to deny his charisma to others. (He voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.) Reclaim’s aims are freedom of speech, the reform of institutions to ensure it, and the realisation of Fox’s personal definition of national pride. His campaign leaflet is a photograph of a muzzled Winston Churchill and a promise to “Scrap plan to tear down London’s statues”. Now he stands for the London mayoralty, where he is currently polling level with Count Binface (“campaigning for justice, lasers, Lovejoy and the return of Ceefax”) on 1%. He says he doesn’t mind about Count Binface, and I believe him, so I wonder if he actually cares about victory or is surfing a wind that appeared to him; the next gig. “I love his work. In Binface we trust.”
His campaigning here, meanwhile, amounts to awkward, and slightly pitiable, flirting: “I have a bag of bunting at home, I forgot to bring it.” It’s the fashion; almost everyone flirts when campaigning, especially the Prime Minister, so Fox can’t be blamed for that. Like every populist showbusiness has created — the obvious comparison is Russell Brand — Fox isn’t interested in details. (Two weeks later I watch a man dressed as a member of the Village People ask him if he would decrimalise drugs. He said he didn’t know.) He prefers to dress up, rant, and flirt. “I don’t do political particularly,” he says, “so whenever I commission a bit of work they [the staff] go, ‘how do you want it to look?’ I say, ‘I don’t care how it looks’”. Instead, he says things like: “What is my mayoral cigarette strategy? ‘Bring back menthol’?”
