The Persecution of Graham Linehan Should Terrify Us

In medieval times, court jesters were typically granted a kind of special immunity. They were often the only ones who were able to freely criticise the King, in a bitingly humorous way. Today’s court jesters have no such protection, as demonstrated by the arrest of comedian Graham Linehan on Monday. 

Linehan—a comedy writer best known for “Father Ted,” “The IT Crowd,” and, more recently, being particularly outspoken on the trans debate—had just got off a plane from Arizona back to the UK when he was arrested by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. He was then thrown into a prison cell and interrogated, in his own words, “like a terrorist.” He was released on bail, on the condition that he not post on X. Why? Because Linehan had committed the ‘crime’ of criticising transgender ideology.

He had been apprehended—and sent to hospital with skyrocketing blood pressure—over three measly tweets. Back in April, Linehan had made a series of posts on X poking fun at trans activists. In one of the offending communications, he wrote: “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 a picture of a trans rally as a “photo you can smell.” He followed that up with a post that read: “hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F**k ‘em.” 

Needless to say, these are all relatively tame as far as tweets go. You don’t have to spend too long digging on that site to find much, much worse, from rabid antisemites wishing death upon Jews to trans activists telling gender-critical women to kill themselves. Presumably, very few or none at all of these posters receive visits from armed policemen. Nonetheless, Linehan is suspected of ‘incitement,’ which has since been confirmed by the Metropolitan Police, although it’s still unclear whether he’ll face charges for this ridiculous accusation. He is already embroiled in a criminal case, in which he is accused of harassing a transwoman last year. It was for this case that Linehan had returned to the UK from the U.S. to appear in court. 

Met chief Mark Rowley has since complained that the police are in an “impossible position” in terms of the clarity of the law and that officers should not get involved in “toxic culture wars”. Rowley also promised to introduce “a more stringent triaging process,” in order to avoid arresting people, like Linehan, who clearly pose no threat and have likely not committed any real crime. Nonetheless, Linehan plans to sue the Met for wrongful arrest.  

There has been a lot of discussion about the ‘proportionality’ of Linehan’s arrest. Of course, all the usual suspects have crawled out of their caves to condemn his tweets and screech about the supposed danger that ‘transphobes’ like Linehan put trans people in. Zack Polanski—the newly elected leader of the Green Party, who believes he has the ability to enlarge women’s breasts through the power of hypnotherapy—called Linehan’s posts “totally unacceptable” and said that sending five armed officers to arrest him was “proportionate.” Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti suggested that we need an “overarching review” of speech offences—although not to ensure that people don’t get bundled into the back of a police van for tweets. Rather, Chakrabarti thinks that “inciting violence even if you say you’re being comical, to be talking about assaulting a group of people who you don’t like, is something worth looking at now.” 

Others, thankfully, have condemned the treatment of Linehan for what it is—a terrifying attempt to silence dissenting individuals. Prime Minister Keir Starmer himself has expressed concern, with an official spokesperson declaring that the PM had made his policing priorities “clear”—that forces should focus on crime in the real world, not managing people’s feelings on social media. Health Secretary Wes Streeting similarly commented that police should direct resources to “streets, not tweets.” Even Guardian journalist and notorious trans apologist Owen Jones has (sort of) spoken out in support of Linehan. On X, he wrote that, although he thinks that “Graham Linehan is beyond awful,” “we should not be arresting people for hateful things they say online.” It’s not exactly a rousing defence of free speech, but it’s a start. 

We can argue about proportionality or the lack thereof, but it’s impossible to talk about this awful display of totalitarianism without acknowledging that it is Linehan’s beliefs that are really being interrogated here. Yes, someone, somewhere found what he wrote offensive. But there is no real victim in this case. Rather, it is an opportunity for the state to flex its censorious muscles. Linehan wrote on Substack that, during his run-in with the law, he was quizzed about his views on “trans people.” When Linehan asked the copper what exactly he meant by that term, he said: “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.” Linehan, very correctly, pushed back against the phrase “assigned at birth,” pointing out that it was activist language. The officer brushed this aside as “semantics,” but it’s clear that this is what Linehan’s persecution has been about—the fact that he refuses to say the magic words “transwomen are women.”

All this becomes even more absurd when you consider the fact that what Linehan believes is not some fringe, extremist position. It is a view held by the majority of normal people. Most Brits don’t want men in women’s bathrooms, prisons, or hospital wards. It’s even a belief that is, theoretically, backed up by law. Have we forgotten that, in April, the UK Supreme Court ruled that gender is defined by biology, for the purposes of the Equality Act (2010)? And that gender-critical views should—again, theoretically—be a protected belief under that same act? No matter the many, many flaws of the Supreme Court and the Equality Act, this is still the law. So why is it that it seems to be applied so selectively? 

This is partially because Linehan has made himself an easy target. He has been unapologetically outspoken in defence of women’s rights and against the creeping influence of trans ideology. Doing so has cost him a great deal—his career, his friends, even his marriage. His celebrity status also makes him a useful warning: if Linehan can be arrested for expressing these views, so can anyone else. As it is, Brits have become used to seeing people hauled away in handcuffs for what amounts to having the ‘wrong’ opinions. 

Linehan himself sums up the absurdity of this situation on his Substack: 

In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for [a] tweet.

This is what the UK has become. The nation that birthed free speech and liberalism has turned into a state that treats people like terrorists for refusing to profess the belief that men can become women. The persecution of Graham Linehan should alarm even his fiercest critics. When being offensive is treated as criminal, none of us are safe.