The Island spent a week arguing about whether Katie Hopkins should be allowed on the Gaiety stage. An MHK objected, the Manx Bard objected, the Lieutenant Governor quietly took the show off his schedule, and the Department put out a statement explaining that a venue booking is not an endorsement. All of which, naturally, produced a full house. The old sign was out on the steps to prove it.
I should declare my position, because it matters to what follows. I am unashamedly of the right, and more so than most. I have real concerns about immigration and the pace of cultural change in Britain and in Europe, and I have never had much patience for the censorious years that produced the pushback in the first place. Hopkins made her name as a provocateur long before that pushback found its politics, but when it did, she became one of its voices. She said things others would not. So I walked in expecting, at worst, to be entertained.
The first surprise was the support act, impressionist Cal Halbert. I was mildly annoyed there was one at all, and within ten minutes I was crying with laughter. Unfiltered, certainly not PC, but never crass, and his accents were impeccable. His Trump reading a nursery rhyme was the hardest I have laughed in years. I turned to my girlfriend and said I did not see how Katie would top that.
She did not. She looked smart, I will give her that, in a blue double breasted suit. But what followed had no politics in it at all. There are serious, defensible arguments to be made about migration and culture, arguments I hold myself, and she reached for none of them. Instead the material was reduced to skin colour and crude gestures, delivered for no purpose I could detect beyond getting a rise. Worse were the repeated jokes at the expense of disabled people. My grandfather was German and served in the war, and no family raised in the shadow of that era mistakes where such talk leads: her commentary put me in mind of nothing less than Nazi eugenics. It was tasteless, it furthered nothing, and it is precisely the sort of garbage that lets people brand those of us with conscientious concerns as racists.
I am a free speech absolutist. Say whatever you like. But there is a difference between someone who values words and someone who deploys them purely to wound. She promised at the start that every one of us would be offended by something. Here is the thing: I was not offended. Not once. I simply sat there, unsmiling, while the room roared.
And that room troubled me more than the stage. A standing ovation, for a singalong, at the end of that. Crowds reward whoever shouts loudest, and history has a few things to say about where that goes.
The strangest part was a dimmed-stage interlude on how unfairly she is portrayed, minutes after declaring that anyone in the limelight must expect flak. The contrast within her own show was sublime and absurd at once.
Here is the irony. The populist movement she attached herself to did not fade; it won. The things she was once notorious for saying are now said daily in parliaments and on mainstream platforms, and a provocateur cannot survive her provocations becoming orthodoxy. All that is left is to reach for ever cruder material, and that is exactly what I watched. Not someone stranded by a receding tide, but someone made redundant by her own side’s success, and it was actually rather sad. I wanted to love this. I hated it.
Charlton Krentz 