Laurence Fox on his war on woke: ‘Success is getting to the end and not losing my mind’

I’m not sure what you call the opposite of a politician, but you wouldn’t go far wrong if you named it Laurence Fox. The Reclaim party candidate for London Mayor in the election on Thursday has a lively sense of the absurd, an inability to do fake earnestness and a willingness, bordering on the kamikaze, to express what millions of people are thinking, but no one dares to say.

When 42-year-old Fox builds up a head of steam, whether it’s about freedom of speech or the iniquities of lockdown (he wants it lifted immediately) or “coercing” people into getting vaccinated (“to bribe people with their own summer holidays is just criminal”) or the tyranny of the woke mob, he has the oratorical fervour of a Billy Graham armed with a flame-thrower. It’s wildly entertaining to be in the audience, but I worry that, in the end, it’s he who’ll get burnt.

“The British people are sick and tired of being told they’re racist scumbags, Allison,” he concludes. You may well be right there, Laurence.

We are talking at Reclaim Party HQ in central London. Fox and Reform Party leader, Richard Tice, have just announced a pact for the London elections. Reform is the Brexit Party rebranded and this temporary alliance has the blessing of Nigel Farage. Surely, Fox’s showbiz friends will be horrified that Farage is backing him for Mayor?

“Ah! but I don’t have any showbiz friends left,” says Fox triumphantly. “It’s supposed to be a horrible thing to say, but I think Nigel Farage is amazing. I had lunch with him. He was really supportive and kind.”

Fox is hard to place politically. He voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2017, but now berates the Prime Minister for being insufficiently Conservative. “I think lockdown is against his (Boris’s) natural principles.” Although he admires the PM’s rhetorical gifts, he thought he was too slow to speak out when protesters scrawled ‘Racist’ on the statue of Churchill.

Fox voted Remain, or, at least, that’s what he has told previous interviewers. “Yeah, I thought that was the best way to wind them up,” he grins, “The Wokies really don’t know what to think if you did something they consider virtuous.”

Is he serious? It’s hard to tell. Did Fox really back Brexit or is this just another turn from the actor who once played DS Hathaway, the pensive, tortured priest then detective in Lewis? I honestly don’t know. Nor, it seems, does the electorate. The day we meet, he is at 1 per cent in the polls, level pegging with a candidate called Count Binface. Despite the fact that London has become a far more violent place on his watch, the current mayor, Sadiq Khan, is still the runaway favourite to win re-election on 63 per cent, with Conservative candidate, Shaun Bailey, trailing on 37 per cent.

You’re not doing that well, are you, Laurence? Joint bottom with a dustbin?

“Depends which poll you look at,” he says cheerfully. “I think The Standard said we were between 4 and 5 per cent and our own private polling says we’re about the same so we’ll see.” When I ask what he would consider to be a success, he says, “Success is standing. Success is getting to the end and not losing my mind.”

He admits it has been a real struggle to juggle the care of his sons, Winston, 12, and Eugene, eight, with the campaign. He shares custody of the boys with his ex-wife, Billie Piper. The blast area from their divorce is a crater and Fox is still picking the shrapnel out of what he admits is a sensitive skin. It can’t be easy having an ex who is a member of the leftie acting tribe by which you are now reviled. Fox maintains a diplomatic silence for the sake of the children, although he does mention that Winston came home recently and said: “Millions and millions of people hate you, Daddy. Mummy likes Sadiq Khan.” Ouch.

How serious is Fox about a political career? Mimicking the fruity baritone of his backer and former Tory party donor Jeremy Hosking, Fox says: “Laurence, darling, we wouldn’t want you in charge of the Tube.”

It’s certainly a stretch to see the charismatic, febrile Fox running the transport system. He finds it funny when his team calls him “Boss”. “I don’t want to rule,” he insists. But Hosking, who gave a chunk of his fortune to the Leave campaign, must have spotted something in him when he stumped up a rumoured £5 million to fund a new political party. In the same way Farage used UKIP to bring about historic change with our relationship with Europe, I picture Fox as a valiant ‘guerrilla’ in the Culture Wars, galvanising the Resistance against the monstrous regiment of woke, subversively fighting tooth and nail for the Britain he loves.

Fox has invaluable first-hand experience of the ‘enemy’. He tells me about a read-through where he explained to a producer that he had a problem with a drama script where every one of the seven supporting actors was diverse.

“I said, this character is his biological dad and the actors are different colours, so, well done on the diversity thing! Not so good on the plot thing.”

All screen marriages today are “mandated” by the Woke police, Fox says. “When you feel a bit of diversity is deliberate, it feels patronising to the person who has been plucked out of the diverse bucket to be shoved into a drama.” He says he finds it “quite patronising and slightly racist, to be honest”.

I suggest that’s all very well coming from a white person who went to Harrow and belongs to a celebrated drama clan. Fox concedes: “I have been privileged all my life”. He is part of the Fox acting dynasty. His father is James Fox, his uncle is Edward and his cousin is Emilia Silent Witness Fox. To be fair, Laurence’s background is more interesting than that gilded CV suggests. In his 30s, James Fox got God, left acting and became a missionary, moving to Leeds and selling telephone cleaning services. He met Mary Piper, a nurse, and they had five children.

Fox does a hilarious impression of his dad going door to door, impossibly handsome, beautifully spoken and wearing his Christian Dior suit: “Have you welcomed Jesus into your life?” I imagine that quite a few Yorkshire housewives got an urge to convert to Christianity.

Laurence refers often to his mother, who died after a fall in April last year. He says he hasn’t grieved for her because he can’t believe that she’s gone. The funeral was a straitened, Covid-secure affair and the only time I see Fox’s bulletproof amiability punctured is when he talks about the unseemly haste with which she was placed into the grave. “They said it was rules about not letting the coffin hang around, but Mum didn’t even have Covid. It was dreadful.”

It is a mercy, perhaps, that she didn’t live to see her beloved son become Britain’s Number One reactionary bogeyman after his appearance on Question Time last January. The panel was discussing the Duchess of Sussex’s treatment by the media when a female academic in the audience claimed the abuse Meghan had attracted was racist. Fox disagreed (“We are the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe”). Fox was then accused of being a “white privileged male” and he shot back that she was being racist.

He thought the broadcast had “gone alright” and had quite a few people contacting him to say “what a relief someone’s finally said it”. Then, he awoke to an exploding phone. The Twitter pitchfork mob was on the warpath. “Suddenly, I was denounced by the whole of showbiz. I thought, Oh, it’ll be alright. But it wasn’t. It just got worse and worse.” Equity called him “a disgrace to our industry”. Fox sued and won, but a 22-year acting career was destroyed overnight. “My agent was like, ‘I’ll stand by you, darling… Get out!’”

With his bitingly camp delivery, Fox makes it sound incredibly funny, but he received death threats. What advice would his mum have given him? “Get on with it, Chum!”

“It’s grim,” he concedes, “but with it comes an incredible feeling of liberation. You think I can say anything because I’m not going to lose my job, because I’ve already lost my job. So now I can resist this disgusting religion of wokery. I’m going to resist it with all of my heart.”

I reckon the parallels with Laurence’s father’s life run deep. Both men were superb actors. Both, in mid-life, sought to use their talents for something deeper. Fox says he has become “more outwardly Christian”. He and the boys say their prayers every night.

Laurence was once a “very very naughty boy” who got expelled from Harrow for having sex at the sixth form dance. With twins. “My choice of venue for said escapade could have been better,” he admits. (Middle of the dance floor on a bar stool). “My ancient housemaster turned to me and said, ‘Your penis was visible.’ Those were our final words.”

His waspish Wildean delivery makes me laugh, but there’s no doubt he’s deadly serious about his new mission. On Thursday night, Reclaim painted the bloody red handprints of 378 children and young people – the victims of knife crime – on a wall opposite the Houses of Parliament. “The fact that three young people died last week and all Khan can do is virtue signal about setting up a City Hall group to tackle the taboo around the menopause is astonishing,” he says.

Laurence Fox may not be anyone’s idea of a politician. Still, I reckon that he can perform an increasingly vital function, saying aloud what mainstream politicians are too frightened to say, challenging the stifling conformity of identity politics. An actor turned evangelist preaching an alternative gospel to the false religion of woke. Get on with it, Chum.