Dystopian fiction often brushes over the most chilling part of the road to madness, which is the road itself. Authors hint at some great calamity or war that sets things in motion, and describe in vivid detail the hulking bureaucracies that grind all courage or curiosity from human beings. But rarely do they place readers in the pot with the frog, watching freedoms dissolve one by one.

This week, Graham Linehan, the creator of Father Ted and the IT Crowd, found himself in just such a pot. As he stepped off a plane from Arizona to Heathrow, five armed police officers greeted him on the tarmac. “When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed,” he later wrote on Substack. “I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists.’”

The officers didn’t laugh. The comedy w

See Full Page