England’s Arrest of Graham Linehan Was an Act of Calculated Tyranny

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, September 02, 2025

 

Here is the first line of a story in today’s Guardian, a British newspaper:

 

The writer of TV’s Father Ted has been arrested at Heathrow over three social media posts on transgender issues.

 

If you click the link and scroll down, you’ll see that there is more to the piece than that one sentence. But there doesn’t need to be. The whole tale is contained within those 19 words. If you read on, you will find no complicating factors or exculpatory details or sins of omission. The news is exactly as it appears: In England, yesterday afternoon, the police deliberately arrested a man who was flying in from the United States because he had expressed views on Twitter that the British government does not like. England — not North Korea, or Russia, or China. England — the land of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine and Monty Python. For tweets on transgender issues. Tweets — not threats of imminent violence, or a credible vow to blow up the airport upon arrival. Tweets — on issues about which people profoundly disagree.

 

Since I moved to the United States in 2011, I have been chronicling the increasingly illiberal attitude to free expression that has been adopted in my country of birth. But this one, I will confess, surprised even me. Typically, I appeal to the First Amendment as the quintessential example of how things ought to be. Here, I do not have to go that far. Here, it is the British censorial attitude, not American permissiveness, that is the outlier on the world stage. I have no brief for Canada or Germany or New Zealand, but, bad as they may be when compared to the United States, I cannot imagine that any of them would have engaged in the same behavior given the same facts. This one was egregious on an entirely new scale.

 

The worst part, I think, is that it happened at Heathrow Airport. Why? Because that confirms that it was planned. Sometimes, police officers overreact or act rashly or misinterpret the law. But this was as deliberate and premeditated as it gets. Having seen a trio of social-media posts of which it disapproved, the Metropolitan Police saw fit to track a man down as he traversed international waters, and to intercept him before he could enter the country. To achieve this end, moreover, they sent no fewer than five officers — enough to staff a basketball team — the better to ensure that they had a policeman for each leg, a policeman for each thumb, and, just in case their target were to shout out defiantly to a phone-wielding assistant, a policeman to cover his mouth. I am making light of it, yes. But, in effect, that was the play: to use the power of the British government to silence a dissenting voice online. As it now stands, Graham Linehan has been bailed pending further investigation — of what, one must ask — with a single stipulation having been attached to his release: that he stay away from Twitter for the duration.

 

The nature of his arrest renders the contrast as clear as it could possibly be. Yesterday, Linehan was in the United States — living his life, sharing his opinions, enjoying his independence. Today, he is in England — under observation, subject to surveillance, at liberty only if he vows not to speak where people might hear. This is not, I’m afraid to say, one of those questions of taste: In this matter, America has got it right, and England has got it wrong. What was done to Graham Linehan was an act of calculated tyranny of the sort to which the British have become far too accustomed. In other circumstances, they would likely be able to see this. Were an Englishman to fly to Moscow and be arrested for making jokes or pointed comments, the contours would at once seem familiar. But with transgenderism as the topic, “hate” as the justification, and the United States as the foil, a myopia descends.

 

I cannot quite put my finger on why, but, all in all, it seems to me wholly appropriate that, immediately after Linehan was arrested for speaking, he was taken to an NHS-run hospital to recover. That, evidently, is the new British mode. In the year 2025, Britain has a parliament that can meet to help you kill yourself, but not to protect your speech; an exchequer that can pluck the population’s feathers from 9,000 different angles, but that has no interest in generating wealth; and a network of police forces that are incapable of solving the most sordid crimes imaginable, but that are sufficiently well-staffed to guarantee that if an outspoken Irish comedian steps off a plane from Arizona, he will be met by enough lawmen to fill a small office. During the worst days of Covid-19, the British government instructed the population to sacrifice every last human desire it had to ensure the survival and comfort of their state-provided nurses. Mercifully, that virus has mostly disappeared. Regrettably, it has been replaced by another one — and, this time, there is no antidote available but sustained mass revolt.