My colleague Damian Thompson has just laid in to Stephen Fry with a vengeance. Here’s the case for the defence, written a few weeks ago after the row over Fry’s Twitter comments:
I see that Stephen Fry is in trouble again, temporarily driven from Twitter by a revolt among his vast army of followers following his intervention in the Daily Mail-Stephen Gately affair. Though no Twitterer myself, I am conscious through more traditional channels of a recent rise in anti-Fry sentiment. And not just in the press, where he is now routinely mangled. He has, I think, over-exposed himself, to coin a Fryesque double entendre. And he shouldn’t have called Jan Moir a “repulsive nobody”, if only because it lays him open to suggestions that he thinks her views invalid because she is not as big a celeb as he is, which I’m sure was not his intention. (With his contention that the Daily Mail is “a paper no decent person would be seen dead with” I have no problem.)
So did he have it coming to him? I don’t think so. Not just because Stephen Fry is very clever, very witty, and widely admired for his humane and liberal views (though I know some see him as the very model of a kickable bien-pensant). The main point about him is that he is transparently a good man. The late Auberon Waugh, whose memory I revere, maintained that the only real distinction between human beings is that between the nice and the nasty. Not all the twitterers and bloggers in the world can pin the label “nasty” on Fry. There is no malice in him, or if there is he has hidden it very well.
Yes, I know he can be maddening. Fry at his archest can make even my loyalty wobble. The American humorist P J O’Rourke coined the term “endearritating”, actually for Dr Ruth Westheimer, but it fits Fry like a glove. But I don’t think venom ought to be directed towards anybody so fundamentally benevolent. Let’s do what we can to support nice people. There isn’t exactly a superfluity of them around.
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