Laurence Fox

Fox, in 2008, outside one of the many universities that refused to accept him.

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Fox is a perennial victim of the violence inherent in the system

“”These people are the establishment. White privilege and casual sexism is the sea they tend to swim in. Attention-seeking haters such as Katie Hopkins and strangely bitter successes such as Piers Morgan help spawn these posh understudies. Their side has won, so why are they such losers? Why are their egos so fragile?

—Suzanne Moore

“”I can barely put a thought together, I’m that ill-educated. I mean, I went to Harrow.

—Laurence Fox

Laurence "Loser Lozza" Fox (1978–) is a British theatrical nepo baby, anti-woke loudmouth, and attempted politician, who's reputation, according to a 2024 legal judgement, is unlikely to be harmed by being described as “a racist”. He is a valiant defender of the greatness of the British Empire and white British people, whilst simultaneously being a beleaguered victim of anti-white/anti-male prejudice and injustice. Since first speaking on the subject of race in January 2020, he has created a series of public controversies, culminating in the launching and hopefully imminent collapse of the right-wing populist Reclaim Party. He has also become associated with the right-wing libertarian sect around Spiked magazine, recording interviews and podcasts with James Delingpole, Julia Hartley-Brewer, etc.

Failed education, failed family life and failed entertainment career

Fox was born to James Fox of the famous Fox theatrical dynasty, during a period when James had dropped out of acting to become a door-to-door evangelical preacher with the Navigators in Leeds. Fox was expelled from exclusive public Harrow School shortly before sitting his A-levels and was subsequently unable to get a place at university. After trying his hand at gardening and clerical work, Fox entered the family business by attending the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and ended up playing a series of feckless toffs, because, "that's what people think Foxes do." Fox, however, does not identify as upper class, stating that he is "not impervious to class… certain struggles":

I have never, ever been hired by the BBC. Why have I never been on the BBC, in 22 years, my entire career — ever?. — Fox on his experience of class struggle

Lozza's only real success as an actor was his nine year stint as the co-lead in the hit detective show Lewis, although considering he was always easily out-acted by everyone else, the term success is debatable.

Fox was married to fellow performer Billie Piper from 2007 to 2016 and now co-parents their two children in a process Piper describes as enormously difficult. In typical fashion, Fox's responce to such criticism is to portray himself as the victim of systemic prejudice and injustice:

The reason co-parenting is hard is because the secretive family court system is hugely weighted towards the mother. It is a system totally unfit for purpose. — Fox on co-parenting with Piper

There has also been family friction with his brother-in-law Richard Ayoade, who mistakenly assumed Fox had never experienced racism:

Yeah, of course I have. I’ve encountered racism from black people towards me, when I was working in Kenya [as a safari driver] for seven months. It’s the way you’re spoken to — racism can be deferential. — Fox on his experience of racism

“No, they weren’t nice to me,” he clarified, before going on to explain:

This is why you don’t get actors involved in chats like this. Because I’m just not smart enough to do it. — Fox on his failiure to explain his experience of racism

Fox's sister now no longer hosts family lunches every Sunday.

Working on his music

He released his first album, Holding Patterns, in 2016, and followed it up with A Grief Observed in 2019. These met with general indifference: Holding Patterns reached 89 in the UK charts in a 2-week chart run, and the follow-up failed to reach the Top 100 despite a large media campaign and a lot of press (based entirely on his acting success and family, and none of it in newspapers' music sections, according to music journalist Michael Hann). Hann said of its merits: "Fox’s music isn't terrible. ... Its single biggest weaknesses is Fox’s voice, which almost touches good, but is also just far enough away to be oddly disconcerting. He hits all the right notes (and in the right order), but it’s a blunt instrument, unvarying in tone and timbre. He always sounds as though he is making a point in a pub argument, whether he is professing his love, pondering the state of the world, or confessing his sins."

Most of his songs are about his divorce from Billie Piper, but his anthem and statement of principles is "The Distance". This includes the classic complaint of the privileged white male media personality who somehow thinks he's censored despite never being out of the newspapers:

The first to fall is laughter
Just to quell the unoffended
They seek to murder your opinion

He improbably promotes himself as a last light of The Enlightenment standing up for reason against intolerance: "The light has been turned down on the age of reason / Replaced by blinding fires that burn wild across the region".

Working on other people's music

On 19 November 2020, he tweeted a typically inflammatory article from the Daily Mail about the 1987 Christmas song "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues. The article claimed that the song was being censored by the BBC due to the homophobic slur "f*****" in the lyrics, although versions without the slur have been played for some years, and the original version with the slur was still broadcast on BBC Radio 2. The article was updated later that day to include the events below. Fox tweeted:

Here we go again. The cultural commissars at the @bbc are telling you what is and isn’t appropriate for your ignorant little ears. Wouldn’t it be nice if we sent the (proper) version to the top of the charts? #DefundTheBBC

Minutes later, The Pogues memorably responded:

Fuck off you little herrenvolk shite

Herrenvolk, meaning "master race", was a concept in Nazi ideology.

Failed political career

Question Time and career suicide

His political views first crawled into daylight when he was selected as a panelist on BBC1 political discussion program Question Time: the show's panel largely comprises politicians and journalists, but they sometimes have a gimmicky non-professional-politico to make up the numbers and inject some new perspectives. A (Black, female) member of the audience asked a question about the sometimes racist attitude of the media to Meghan Markle, the mixed-race wife of Prince Harry. Fox denied that there was any racism involved in the way certain sections of the media took a pathological hatred to Markle, and when it was suggested that Fox as a wealthy white person might enjoy a certain amount of privilege, he said it was "racist" to call him a "white, privileged male". He also said, "It's so easy to throw the card of racism at everybody… and it's really starting to get boring now." Fox's boredom at the subject of racism produced a certain media storm.

In the aftermath he emphasized his cluenessness on race by criticising the 2019 film 1917 (directed by Sam Mendes) for including a Sikh character, saying it "felt incongruous" and referring to "oddness in the casting". Fox was unaware that 130,000 Sikh soldiers served in World War One as part of the army of British India. After criticism, Fox apologised.

He has criticised Black History Month for "indoctrination and divisive ideologies", tweeting a link to an article by Calvin Robinson with the same message. Robinson is a Senior Fellow at the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, which has close links to the British government, and personally believes "#BlackLivesMatter is a dangerous mix of Marxism and Critical Race Theory, which poses a fundamental threat to race relations in Britain."

He claims to have been ostracized by the acting world for his beliefs. He caused a massive argument at British actors' union Equity: after his Question Time appearance, ethnic minority union reps accused him of acting to "berate and bully women of colour attempting to discuss issues of race and gender discrimination", "playing to the gallery, a populist tirade, with women of colour being used as cannon fodder", and said he had been trying to conceal his privilege and "damn any recognition of that privilege as the very racism he claims is exaggerated when people of colour try to discuss it". Fox threatened to sue Equity for libel, and the union's leadership apologised, but in response its entire race equality committee resigned in protest at the apology.

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

In September 2020, he announced he was forming a new political party, and claimed to have received £5 million (US$ 6.4m) in donations. The party is provisionally called Reclaim. Its policies are vague but it wants to reform broadcasting and education to be "free from political bias". One of the main donors is Jeremy Hosking, who made his fortune in private equity and has donated millions to causes around Brexit and the Conservative Party. In the first quarter of 2021, the party received a sizable £1,153,300 in donations, mostly from Hosking.

Fox stood in the 2021 London mayoral election, with the main points of his platform being eliminating regulations against the spread of COVID-19 and opposing "political correctness". He received 1.9% of first-preference votes (47,634), almost twice as many as Count Binface of the Count Binface Party, a man dressed as a bin who polled 1%. He was outpolled by Niko Omilana, a YouTuber who had pledged to cut the price of Freddos chocolate bars to 5p. Needless to say, he lost the deposit.

Reclaim currently has no MPs. Andrew Bridgen, who was expelled from the Conservative Party for comparing vaccines to The Holocaust, briefly joined the party after his expulsion, but later quit due to differences with Fox.

Omnishambles

Fox was, of course, a COVID-19 denialist and antivaxxer throughout the pandemic, Tweeting unwanted advice to the man who had beat him by quite a significant margin to be London Mayor, Sadiq Khan:

Or you could just gently encourage everyone to take their masks off, try to forget the madness that has been Covid hysteria and get on with their lives. – Fox making a bad call.

On January 30, 2022, four days after sharing a selfie of himself wearing a T-shirt emblazoned, “No vaccine needed, I have an immune system,” Fox tweeted out:

In other news, felt shivery and crap yesterday. Turns out I have been visited by Lord Covid at last and have the Omnicold (if the LFT is to be believed!) On the #Ivermectin, saline nasal rinse, quercetin, paracetamol and ibruprofen. More man flu than Wu- flu at the moment. – Fox demonstrating his commitment to woo.

Perfectly-timed transphobia

In June 2022, he was suspended from Twitter after declaring his admiration of far-right-affiliated transphobe Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (Posie Parker), attacking trans rights and posting a swastika made up of trans pride and LGBT rainbow flags. His actions were widely condemned as they happened the same weekend as an attack on a gay bar in Oslo. He was also condemned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust who said: “We are appalled to see Laurence Fox's vile tweet this morning with abhorrent use of the swastika. Gay men experienced untold suffering under the Nazis, including murder, castration and medical experimentation." “Ignorance of this history can only exacerbate present-day discrimination faced by #LGBTQ+ people.”

Misogynistic rantings

There was a time when Fox presented a regular Friday night TV slot on GB News, the UK's answer to Fox News. His time on the network was relatively brief due to his appearance on Dan Wootton Tonight (another current affairs series by GB News) in 2023. Angry at a female journalist named Ava Evans because of comments she made about male suicide, Fox launched into a misogynistic tirade about Evans while presenter Dan Wootton smirked and laughed. For readers curious about what was said, Fox claimed that no "self-respecting man" would ever want to sleep with Evans ("who'd want to shag that?") and called her "pathetic and embarrassing". Fox later apologised for his remarks and described them as "a bit crass."

In a stopped clock moment for the company, GB News sacked Fox and suspended Wootton, calling Fox's comments "unacceptable". A third presenter who had defended the two men was also sacked, while Wootton remains suspended as an internal investigation into his behaviour continues.

Fox was arrested by the Metropolitan Police on October 4 2023, the same day as his firing from GB News, for calling on people unhappy with London's Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to destroy traffic cameras and saying that he himself would take part in such activity.

To add insult to injury, while Fox was being held in police custody, he was apparently informed that he'd been fired from GB News.

Having a mare

On March 23, 2024, ahead of friendly between England and Brazil at Wembley, Fox held a 'rally for British culture' at the Cenotaph. The protest was called amid backlash to the new England home kit featuring a purple and pink St George’s Cross. Fox compared the colours to the bisexual pride flag and called for the boycott of its maker Nike. It was, however, pointed out that he did this whilst wearing a pair of Nike high-tops.

Fox's plans to stand in the 2024 London mayoral election were scuppered, when, unlike more politically savvy campaigners, such as the aforementioned Count Binface, his team failed to complete the nomination forms in time. This at least saved him the cost of losing his deposit again.

Fox joined fellow bigot Tommy Robinson at a 2024 St George’s Day rally which started with disorder, animal cruelty and arrests, and ended with Fox whining at a police officer about being jostled.

I was just crossing the road and I got pushed over by a fucking cop. Well, not pushed over but pushed. – Fox explaining how he was "manhandled".

A video titled "Loser Lozza wtf?" by X user Jerry Hicks captured the following confrontation:

Don't fuck with me - you are policing by consent. Don't fucking talk to me like I am some slave of yours. Stop talking to me like you're my fucking boss, 'cause you ain't. Alright? Fuck you. – Fox demonstrating how a wannabe London Mayor engages with the Met Police.

The brave little trooper later posted, "I pray for the courage demanded to help bring about a revolution so sincerely needed. In the words of NWA Fuck the Police."

Distinctively homophobic

On April 25, 2024, Fox was ordered to pay £90,000 in "purely compensatory" damages each to Simon Blake (of LGBT charity Stonewall UK and Mental Health First Aid England) and Crystal (a performer from Ru Paul's Drag Race UK whose real name is Colin Seymour) having lost a High Court libel case for Twitter comments described by Justice Rowena Collins Rice as "distinctively homophobic".

By calling Mr Blake and Mr Seymour paedophiles, Mr Fox subjected them to a wholly undeserved public ordeal. It was a gross, groundless and indefensible libel, with distressing and harmful real-world consequences for them. – Justice Collins Rice

The case had been brought into a responce to a quickly deleted Tweet in which Fox attemtpd to prove that he wasn't a racist by (falsely) calling people paedophiles on Twitter, believing this was recompense for being accused of racism.

During the trial, Fox claimed he was a victim of anti-white racism, stating:

There’s huge quantities of anti-right white racism in the world. It’s the only acceptable form of racism there is left. – Fox

He also dismissed the concept of white privilege as “disgusting racism,” adding:

I choose to understand white privilege as a racist insult because it’s about the colour of your skin, and it’s not about the content of your character. – Fox

And he refered to Black Lives Matter as a “grift” and a “Ponzi scheme”.

Collins Rice did not rule on whether describing Fox as “a racist” was “substantially true”, but found that the tweets making this claim were unlikely harm to his reputation, and that he had tried to hold Blake and Seymour responsible "for a range of his own life's adversities".

External links

• LozzaFox on Twitter
• Reclaim Party on Twitter
• Reclaim Party website