Who Called Stephen Fry?

Luvviedom is Labourland. You'll have to walk an awful long way in theatre and the arts to find anyone who - publicly at any rate - isn't smugly pink or who is willing to criticise socialism's drawbacks, blindspots and mistakes. This is beginning to change in a small way, but not significantly. So it was no surprise to find Stephen Fry, the acceptable face of intellectualism for the dumbdown generation, defending MPs defrauding the taxpayer and political class fiddling in general. After all, the man is a convicted fraudster himself.

Stephen Fry is the kind of champagne socialist Fabian who has lots of opinions about everyday life but not much recent experience (by which I mean experience of average financial reality)of it - largely because he's a millionaire (I applauded Keith Richards years back when he said: "I don't comment on public afairs because I don't live in the real world" Quite so). Fry was a leading player in the noisily left-wing alternative comedy movement of the 80s - most members of which are now far richer, more powerful and more smug than the largely working class comics they hated so much 25 years ago (Fry does get some honourable exception here - he defended Bernard Manning and others) and are now firmly part of the Blairish British Establishment.

I'm very curious as to how Fry came to be asked on Newsnight on Monday about what he thought of the MPs expenses scandal. A television presenter and comedian is suddenly a political pundit for a night. Why didn't they ask Roy "Chubby" Brown as well? I'm not one for conspiracy theories but if there isn't some hidden connection between the interview and Labour's communications office I will be very surprised. Roughly speking, the BBC is an extension of Labour's arts and social policy and is the product of four generations of middle class Marxists; a sort of permanent socialist cultural government by television, radio and the net. The chances of Fry's consultation being 'accidental' are remote. I have put in a FoI request to the BBC asking who made the editorial decision to interview him and why. So should you.

Fry' comments, surprise surprise, had just the effect the Government would have liked - all of a sudden facebook comments started popping up applauding Fry's 'common sense' towards fiddling MPs. I can just imagine in the hours before Fry spoke on tv someone quite high up in the Labour media team saying, 'This is bad. We can't lose the Facebook generation over this. Isn't there anyone who can help us minimize this?...'