Culture

Hugh Grant Is Living His Best British Election


It’s difficult to feel energized about the general election in Britain, which takes place on Thursday. Neither of the two protagonists—Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party—is many voters’ cup of tea. The slogans are pretty dismal. “Get Brexit Done” is the Conservatives’ insistent, passive-aggressive cry. Labour wants to nationalize your broadband provider. The Liberal Democrats, who start off each election campaign thinking that this could be their year, are fading fast. Christmas looms. So thank the Lord—and not for the first time—for Hugh Grant. The actor, who is best known for rendering exquisitely the many stages of a diffident British person in the process of making up his mind and then, fuck it all, following his heart, has decided to get involved. Grant is fifty-nine years old and turning silver. Since the election was called, in late October, Grant has been lively on social media—he’s a mite over half a million Twitter followers—tweeting about the National Health Service and describing Johnson as a “weak little Narcissus.” For the past few weeks, Grant has lent his support to campaigns in a half-dozen tight parliamentary races, hoping to prevent the Conservatives from winning a majority and finally delivering Brexit.

“As a father of five children, I want to save the country from catastrophe,” Grant told the Chichester Observer, over the weekend, after speaking to Labour supporters in the Sussex town of Crawley. Grant professes to have no party affiliation. Like others for whom stopping Brexit has become their defining political identity, Grant is encouraging people to vote for the local candidate who stands the best chance of beating the Conservatives, in an attempt to deprive Johnson of the mandate that he is widely expected to win. “I’m not anything,” Grant said, in Crawley. “What I am is a bloke in a panic about the precipice we stand on in this country.” In 2017, Grant’s own constituency, Chelsea and Fulham, in West London, was won comfortably by the Conservatives. On Tuesday, he was in Reading West, another Tory-held seat, in London’s commuter belt. “Yeah, get the young people out,” Grant said soberly, in a video with Rachel Eden, the Labour candidate who is running for Parliament there. “If you know a young person, get them to the polls. Drag them by the hair if you have to.” Eden laughed nervously. Grant flashed a scene-ending smile.

Grant’s top-level political experience comes mostly from his role as David, the Prime Minister, in “Love Actually,” the Richard Curtis film from 2003. To British audiences, Grant’s voice and other class signifiers suggested that he was a handsome, modernizing Tory—a David Cameron before David Cameron. He sashayed down the stairs of 10 Downing Street to “Jump,” by the Pointer Sisters, fell in love with Natalie, a young staffer from Wandsworth, and told a sleazy U.S. President where to get off. In one scene, searching for Natalie, David knocked on doors on a South London street with his security detail, singing Christmas carols and generally apologizing. “Sorry about all the cock-ups,” he told one voter. “My Cabinet are absolute crap.” In 2018, Grant played Jeremy Thorpe in “A Very English Scandal,” the story of a former Liberal Party leader disgraced by a gay affair and charges in an alleged murder plot. (Grant was nominated for a Golden Globe for the role.) In between, Grant was a prominent campaigner for stronger privacy laws and media regulation in the U.K., meaning that his political persona has got quite a lot going on. His chosen outfit on the campaign trail is a dark-blue rain jacket, a crisp white shirt, and a black sweater: charismatic former statesman lending a hand to the cause. Last week, canvassing for the Liberal Democrats in North London, Grant joked that he used to run the Party. He knocked on the door of a Labour supporter named Grant Nairn, who was weighing his vote. Nairn’s ten-year-old daughter, Lulu, recognized Grant from “Paddington 2” and “Two Weeks Notice.” “It’s, like, oh my God, someone famous is outside my window,” she told the Press Association. “It was so awesome.”

It hasn’t taken long—at all—for Grant’s presence to have an influence on the election. Politicians seem to have decided that a sprinkle of abashed romance wouldn’t hurt the British electorate. A few weeks ago, Rosena Allin-Khan, a Labour M.P. running in Tooting, in South London, made an election video in the style of “Love Actually,” in which she knocked on a voter’s door and enacted a version of the scene in which Andrew Lincoln, playing the lovelorn friend of Keira Knightley, silently declares his feelings to her on a series of large, hand-drawn signs.

On Monday, with the election three days off, the fourth wall—or maybe the last supporting wall—of British politics collapsed, when Johnson and the Conservatives decided to rip off the idea for their final election broadcast. You can watch the scene, if you have the strength, here. Johnson materializes at the house of a pair of disgruntled voters. He places a boom box, which plays “Silent Night,” on the sidewalk while he unveils a sequence of truly dispiriting placards about working majorities and hung Parliaments to an oddly compliant woman. “The other guy could win,” one of the cards says. It’s interesting how different politicians and actors actually are. Johnson acts the skit as if he’s not sure the woman can read and then stalks off down the street. “Enough,” he murmurs. “Let’s get this done.” On Tuesday morning, Grant was asked about the ad on “Today,” the BBC’s flagship political show. He praised the production values but noted that one of the more affecting cards from “Love Actually” was missing from Johnson’s hands. It reads “Because at Christmas you tell the truth.”



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