Thought leader? Surely Laurence Fox's cruellest miscasting yet

Draw near, rubberneckers, for there are further developments in the vision quest of future I’m a Celebrity booking Laurence Fox. On Sunday, one of Britain’s best-connected supporting actors announced he was launching a new political party, whose stated aim is to fight the culture wars.

Ah, the romance of the culture war – what a pull it is! Riding the dairy horse down to the village hall to join up, setting off for the front with a song in your heart, telling your sweetheart you’ll return to her an officer.

Cut to six months later, to find you soaked to the skin 24 hours a day by the cry-laugh emoji, snatching 10 minutes’ sleep – standing up – before it’s time to tweet something historically pointless again, and sobbing your heart out as some random BBC executive takes nine hours to expire out in the razor wire of no-man’s land. Murdoch and Zuckerberg 40 miles behind at a commandeered estate, divvying up the paintings and cracking open another bottle of Chateau Don’t-Mind-If-Do. Still: that’s showbiz. Dulce et decorum est pro retweets mori.

By now, you may feel we are racing ahead of ourselves, so let’s sling another chair leg on the fire and treat ourselves to a recap. Following an eye-catching appearance on the Question Time panel back in January, during which he accused a mixed-race audience member of racism against him or something, acting’s Laurence Fox has been actively positioning himself as a thought leader. This is certainly his cruellest miscasting yet – and I’m including singer-songwriter in that.

Thanks to a Sunday Telegraph exclusive, we now learn the former Lewis sidekick is to set up a party with the working title of Reclaim, which one source describes as “a Ukip for culture”. A styling which has all the promise of the Tea Party for the mind, or the DUP for Italian Renaissance painting, or the Khmer Rouge for disco. According to Laurence, he has already raised £5m, including sums from former Tory donors. There is a mission statement, in which someone who used to be number two to Inspector Morse’s former number two declares that our public institutions have overreached themselves. He promises to “change everything … with love, reason, and understanding”. Yes, it’s all shaping up as THE greatest ever origin story for Celebs Go Dating 2022.

But listen, I love this kid, 42, who simply wants us to be able to “celebrate our shared national history”. Don’t ask which bits. I think just, like, all of it? So, winning the second world war, of course, but also stuff like getting conquered by the Normans, and syphilitic kings screwing over their underlings, and the enclosures and the religious torture and the executions and whatnot. It’s ALL amazing, and you have to love it all, the same amount, and not make disloyal judgments that some of it, maybe, was a bit of a shitter for some people.

Until then, first impressions of the Reclaim venture are that it might not be quite as radical as is being made out. I can’t think of anything more hilariously establishment than feeling so affronted by something that you create a political party to counter it, with erstwhile Tory donors, then announce it in a quilted-jacketed interview with the Sunday Telegraph. It’s like Bruce Wayne deciding to run for Gotham City council on a continuity platform. It may even be wankier than the People’s Vote. Either that or “Reclaim” is another clever loss-making accounting scheme created for Tory donors such as Gary Barlow to avoid tax.

Perhaps the rebel element was provided by Fox’s decision to promote it by showing he has had the words “Freedom” and “Space” tattooed on his hands. On Sunday, Laurence posted a single picture with his fists pushed together so the new inkings read “Freedom Space”. Which I guess is preferable to “Living Space”. Even so, there is a sense that political and historical literacy are not going to be his strong points.

No doubt Laurence would be furiously offended at the suggestion he is being used by forces beyond his comprehension. As we know, there is no snowflake quite so snowflakey as a self-styled scourge of snowflakes. He recently spent a day publicly attacking the actor Rebecca Front for “cancelling” him, on the basis she had blocked him.

Furthermore, Fox is the sort of passionate defender of free speech who would be outraged if you mentioned he’s looking increasingly dishevelled these days, and is probably best interviewed on the finer points of Enlightenment history before lunch. One hates to remind him to look to his idols, but even Nigel Farage scrupulously avoided the impression that he was sleeping in his car. Hand on heart, I can’t help feeling a considerable portion of the £5m would be better spent on a break at some nice head-spa in Arizona – one of those dressing-gowned facilities with names like Pastures or Pathways or Vista Lodge.

Instead, experience suggests Laurence will have a whole host of explanations other than the bleeding obvious as to why on earth he’s gone down this rocky road. “I didn’t choose this path, but I feel like it’s calling me, you know?” “If you’d told me a year ago I’d be doing this, instead of playing Michael Heseltine for six minutes total screen time in a highly indifferent Sky One Falklands miniseries, I’d never have believed you.” And the one-size-fits-all classic: “People are describing me as a clueless waster – that’s how I know I’m winning.”

For the rest of us, then, the spectacle continues. Having spent two months of a plague summer arguing over such matters as Proms songs, we move into a plague autumn for more of the same, with neither side having managed to move their trench so much as a quarter of an inch. Truly a land of hopelessness and ingloriousness, and I myself will take to a pub car park to fight anyone who ever attempts to “celebrate” this particular phase of our national history.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist