Is John Cleese turning… based?

Anyone who has stumbled on John Cleese’s X feed lately will have been in for a bit of a surprise. Where most A-listers use social media to witter on about ‘trans kids’, ICE or the latest cause célèbre, the Monty Python star has blazed an altogether different trail. Broadcasting to his 4.9million followers on X, Cleese has slammed Islamic sectarianism, blasted woke censorship and even quote tweeted a recent piece from spiked. Whisper it, but could Cleese be the ‘based’ national treasure Britain needs right now?

Awards season is in full swing, which means celebs are usually eager to hold forth on the big issues of the day. Yet you’d be hard pressed to name a single public figure using their sainted platform to show solidarity with the slain dissidents of Iran, or with the women oppressed by the rule of the mullahs. Cleese, in contrast, has been on something of a warpath when it comes to Islamic extremism – both at home and abroad. He now regularly takes to X to savage Iran’s Islamist theocrats, as well as their sycophants and apologists in the West. Unlike most luvvies, who never tire of love-bombing the BBC, Cleese repeatedly slammed his former paymaster in the run-up to the Iran invasion, mostly for its monstrous indifference to the ayatollahs’ mass murder of tens of thousands of anti-regime protesters.

And where most of Britain’s great and good wring their moisturised hands over the alleged scourge of ‘Islamophobia’, Cleese has refused to let that censorious charge stand in the way of what he wants to say. Many of his tweets on Islam are spicy even for my acerbic taste, but it’s also clear that Cleese’s animus is not racial. For instance, he is just as angry with mostly white, woke enablers of the predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs as he is with the perpetrators themselves. He derides both the Islamic sectarians behind campaigns like the Muslim Vote and the slimy, faux-left poseurs like the Greens, desperate to be ‘in cahoots’, as he puts it, with those illiberal reactionaries.

Inevitably, Cleese has amplified his fair share of random, unverified social-media slop. But to be fair, the man is 86 years old and is tweeting at 120mph. He is bound to get a few things wrong along the way. And is it not far better that someone like Cleese feels free to tweet what’s on his mind, than having him issue bland, PR-rinsed statements expressing the same tired, predictable views and clichés?

No doubt many leftish, liberal observers might find it odd that Cleese has taken against Islam so strongly. But that is to forget that he is an unforgiving critic of religion in general. Monty Python’s The Life of Brian was treated as a blasphemous provocation on its release in 1979. It outraged the prim, proper and politically correct censors of its day. The BBC and ITV refused to show it. It was banned from cinemas in several local councils and screenings were picketed by Mary Whitehouse. Cleese isn’t simply picking on one religion, but kicking against rigid orthodoxy and illiberalism – and he has the battle scars to prove it.

Back in the late 1970s, the Pythons’ heresies against Christianity landed them in hot water. In 2026, Islam is the organised religion that it is forbidden to satirise and mock. Indeed, just this week, the Labour government unveiled its long-awaited definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ – a not-so-subtle attempt to introduce an Islamic blasphemy law via the backdoor. Meanwhile, the Crown Prosecution Service has spent the past year in a protracted battle with the courts, in its determination to prosecute a Kurdish asylum seeker for burning the Koran. Insult Islam and you’re in trouble is the message being broadcast by the British authorities.

The question all this raises should not be: why does John Cleese keep banging on about Islamism? But rather: why have so many in the cultural elites kept completely schtum about Islamism? Why do so many so-called ‘free-thinkers’, ‘radicals’ and ‘progressives’ have so little to say about the unchecked rise of religious reactionaries in Britain, or about their tyrannical cousins in the Middle East? A movement that menaces women and non-believers – including racial and religious minorities – does not deserve the free pass it’s been given by those who profess to be opposed to ‘hate’.

Perhaps they’re afraid. Perhaps they mistakenly believe they’re being ‘kind’. Either way, the ex-Python’s X rants put his fellow celebs to shame. More power to Cleese’s Twitter fingers.

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