How Jaguar became a vehicle for LGBT idiocy

The unveiling of Jaguar’s new electric concept car this week was predictably overshadowed by that advert it released earlier this month.

The Jaguar ad was widely mocked, and deservedly so. Its miserabilist cast looked like they had discharged themselves from an institution for the radically neurodivergent, before raiding some bins for random things to wear. ‘Copy nothing’, read the slogan.

The campaign was so bonkers it was tempting to assume it was a joke or an accident. Some of the company’s fans tried to insist the ad was merely a clever way of generating coverage. If only that were true. It actually represented the culmination of a decade-long campaign to groom a classic British brand by the increasingly demented LGBT lobby.

One hint of this could be spotted in a wildly favourable review of the ad in LGBT magazine Attitude. The same article also revealed that the magazine’s publisher, Darren Styles, had been among a select group of journalists given a sneak preview of the car ahead of its official launch.

It might seem surprising that a tiny LGBT magazine (with a circulation so low it doesn’t publish any figures) was invited to a major car brand’s top-secret marketing event. But it shouldn’t be. Because, for almost a decade, Attitude and its owner have been guiding Jaguar in a high-risk pivot away from its traditional customers and towards the LGBT community.

The ‘Copy nothing’ campaign appears to have had an early rehearsal in October 2021, when Jaguar tried out vibrant colours and meaningless slogans in ads tailored for Attitude readers. One ad featured an unremarkable photo of an orange Jaguar F-Type on a brighter orange background, with the lame tagline, ‘Live Loud’. Marketing research firm Kantar claimed that it was ‘ranked among the top UK ads of all time’. This may or may not have something to do with the fact Kantar is openly aligned with the LGBT lobby, recently insisting that ‘Brand LGBTQ+ allyship is more important than ever’.

Either way, the alleged effectiveness of Jaguar’s Attitude ad was music to the ears of the company’s marketing director, Anthony Bradbury. In December 2021, he told Marketing Week that the LGBT community would be Jaguar’s new focus. ‘We’ve seen really good synergy between [Attitude’s]… audience and our brand’, he said. He then said that the ad embodied the motto of Jaguar founder William Lyons: ‘Jaguar should be a copy of nothing.’ Sound familiar?

That was just the start. In 2022, Jaguar’s global head of public relations, Ken McConomy, told an event hosted by public-relations magazine PRWeek that Attitude’s readership was ‘the right audience’ for the manufacturer. Summing up its interview with McConomy, PRWeek observed: ‘Historically, Jaguar was an old-fashioned, British brand… today, one of its key media partners is Attitude magazine.’

This was no exaggeration. According to Jaguar, Attitude has been a ‘proud partner’ since 2016, the same year the magazine was bought by publisher and car enthusiast Darren Styles, who also used to publish Jaguar’s in-house magazines.

Within a year, Attitude was producing LGBT video content bearing the Jaguar logo. This included a series of interviews with mostly LGBT celebrities called In the Back Seat, which took place in a Jag. In 2019, the partnership celebrated the launch of a new drag-queen series. It was called Jag Race, because of course it was.

Jaguar’s website currently features interviews with LGBT designers and performers with the legend ‘Jaguar and Attitude magazine have partnered to amplify the breakthrough stories of celebrated queer creatives who live unapologetically in their creative fields’.

All that LGBT propaganda seems to have gone to the Jaguar bosses’ heads. Last year, chief executive Adrian Mardell became the ‘first ally CEO’ to march in the Birmingham Pride parade. This year, he appeared at the British LGBT Awards to receive a gong for Business Ally of the Year. His acceptance speech urged the audience to ‘make sure you look in the mirror and say, I love you’. Trust me Adrian, no one in that audience needed any encouragement to look in a mirror.

At the heart of the partnership between Jaguar and Attitude was the car company’s lavish sponsorship of the magazine’s annual ‘Attitude Awards’ (which are apparently entirely different from the innumerable other LGBT-themed awards events that clutter up the ‘queer’ calendar). At this year’s awards, Jaguar brand director Santino Pietrosanti made clear the company shared the LGBT lobby’s mission to change how the public think and behave. Pietrosanti promised that Jaguar will ‘keep pushing forward’ on the issue of diversity, equity and inclusion, focussing not just on ‘new cars’, but also on ‘new ways of thinking’.

Forget for a moment whether it is the job of a car manufacturer to change how we think about anything other than its products. We first need to ask this: how does Jaguar think we, the intellectually unwashed public, should think? Jaguar’s bosses have been told by Attitude that the ‘right’ thinking is whatever the LGBT lobby says it is. Yet this advice has been far from evidence-based or neutral.

Darren Styles, in particular, has been embroiled in a virulent online campaign against any woman who speaks up against the most extreme interpretation of ‘trans rights’. He has, for example, called JK Rowling a ‘peddler of hate’ and blamed her for ‘endangering’ trans people by ‘misgendering’ them. He also demanded that UK prime minister Keir Starmer discipline his former MP, Rosie Duffield, for her gender-critical beliefs. He recently ranted about the NHS’s ban on puberty blockers, denouncing health secretary Wes Streeting (also a gay man) in the process. He also ridiculed gay former MP Neale Hanvey when he spoke up against a ban on ‘trans conversion therapy’. He called Allison Bailey, a black lesbian, ‘a terrible person’, urging people not to donate to her crowdfund for a discrimination case. All this means that Jaguar – a car company – has effectively been backing one side in a gay-rights civil war.

It gets worse. When Anneliese Dodds, minister for women and equalities, promised to defend women’s single-sex spaces, Styles said he looked forward to ‘hairy-assed, bearded transmen taking a big dump in the cubicle next to [her] so she feels safe’. This is what apparently now passes for ‘progressive’ in the LGBT lobby.

None of this angry trolling ever gave Jaguar any pause for thought. Nor has the output of Attitude itself. When ‘drag king’ Chiyo Gomes, a biological woman, was nominated as a finalist in Mr Gay England in 2020, the magazine quoted her approvingly when she declared: ‘I have a period once a month and I have no qualms openly talking about how my pussy bleeds and how difficult that makes navigating spaces as a gay man.’ Charming.

Attitude also handed trans activist Dylan Mulvaney its Woman of the Year Award last year. Accepting the award on the night, he said: ‘No matter how hard I try, or what I wear, or what surgeries I have, I will never reach an acceptable version of womanhood by those hateful people’s standards.’ That’s right, Dylan, none of those things will ever make you a real woman.

That Jaguar executives saw fit to stamp their company’s logo over this kind of LGBT extremism shows they have lost the ability to think for themselves. It is surely this grooming by Styles and Attitude that explains Jaguar’s decision to chase the LGBT menagerie and ignore the general public. The LGBT lobby’s angry, self-righteous outlook found perfect expression in that bizarro ‘Copy nothing’ ad.

Whether Jaguar’s new electric car flops as a result of all this remains to be seen. It would hardly be surprising if Jaguar’s traditional audience – the people who actually buy its cars – give up on the company in response to all this insufferable virtue-signalling. After bending the knee so readily to the trans cause, that would be the least Jaguar deserves.

Malcolm Clark is a TV producer. Visit his substack, The Secret Gender Files, here.