Laurence Fox has lost his ‘good name’: what now for the sad clown of the culture wars circus? | Marina Hyde

A high court ruling marks the climax of Fox's comic unravelling. Now let's focus on the figures who pull his strings

Did some randos calling him a racist" on the platform formerly known as Twitter cost Laurence Fox his acting career? No, suggests a judgment from the high court, where a judge also found the actor turned thought leader to have defamed said randos by calling them paedophiles". You can't just call any old person a paedophile, apparently - unless you're the owner of Twitter/X, of course, and you get sued in the US as opposed to the UK, like Elon Musk did by that Thai cave rescue diver a few years back. Appearing on the steps outside a Los Angeles courtroom following his favourable verdict, Musk declared: My faith in humanity is restored". These were not the words of Laurence Fox yesterday.

Instead, the Reclaim party leader and Hunter Biden biopic star offered a nine-minute monologue outside the high court that had a distinctly after lunch" feel to it. What we've got, after several million quid, is a nothing burger," elucidated Fox. Laurence was wearing glasses with transition lenses, which - and like him, I'm just making a rhetorical point here - always look like a come-and-get-me plea to the beast wing at HMP Full Sutton. He was accompanied by his girlfriend, Liz Barker. Liz believes the moon landings were faked, and has previously stated she doesn't buy the whole theory of human evolution from apes. (No. I think we come from another race.")

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist