Graham Linehan’s arrest heaps shame upon Britain

Graham Linehan had only just stepped back on to UK soil when he was apprehended by five armed police officers. The comedy writer – known for Father Ted, The IT Crowd and his unflinching gender-critical activism – says he was arrested, locked in a cell and interrogated by police yesterday, immediately after landing at London Heathrow.

His crime, he says, was to have spoken his mind – one of the most serious offences you can commit in the eyes of the British state. During his interrogation, he claims he was asked to explain three supposedly offensive tweets, posted back in April, mocking trans activists and their attempts to invade women’s spaces.

In one tweet, he joked: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.’ In another, he described an image of a trans-activist march as a ‘photo you can smell’. In a follow-up tweet, he said: ‘I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck em.’

Linehan’s belief that men aren’t women is based on biological truth. It is the view of the overwhelming majority of British citizens. It has been upheld by the UK Supreme Court. It is also a protected belief in the workplace under the Equality Act. Yet none of this seems to matter to the UK’s thoughtpolice. According to Linehan’s account, a trans activist claimed offence and so the Met swooped in, acting as the personal goon squad of the mad, bad and sad.

The Kafkaesque horror of his arrest, the stress of being criminalised for his tweets, seems to have sent Linehan’s blood pressure through the roof. He was escorted from the police station to A&E, where he wrote a damning account of the experience from his hospital bed on his Substack:

‘I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online – all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers. To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men.’

He has now been released on bail, apparently on the sole condition that he does not tweet. Whoever had sought to silence him seems to have succeeded. The Met have confirmed his arrest on ‘suspicion of inciting violence’, though have said no more on whether charges will be brought.

What happened to Graham Linehan here is no aberration. This is simply what the UK is now: a nation that locks up comedy writers. A nation where armed police are ready to pounce on the orders of the easily offended. We must never make the mistake of thinking any of this is normal.

To crib a line from Father Ted, we need to say ‘Down with this sort of thing’. Once and for all.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.