Britain’s creative class functions as a gated community, policed by fashion and bounded by fear. For decades, comedy writer turned presenter and children’s author David Walliams was safely inside the walls: his best-selling books populated the shelves of schools and Little Britain, the show he co-created, became a part of the comedy canon.

Walliams rose to fame portraying Emily Howard, a transvestite whose insistence, “I’m a lady”, in the face of every challenge provoked hilarity. Meanwhile, comedy writer Graham Linehan has spent recent years becoming infamous for disputing the same claim when it is made in earnest. The disparity in how the two men have been treated is instructive.

Linehan, who has refused to apologise for his campaigning against trans ideology, has been effectively exiled from British cultural life and forced to start again in the United States. Walliams, by contrast, perfected the art of saying sorry and was repeatedly granted the benefit of the doubt, remaining comfortably on the lucrative side of history.

Walliams has expressed regret for Little Britain’s blackface characters once Black Lives Matter rendered them politically indefensible, and apologised for the obscene off-camera remarks he made about Britain’s Got Talent contestants after leaked footage made them impossible to ignore. In each case, criticism was absorbed, reputational damage contained, and Walliams carried on with television appearances and children’s book sales largely intact. According to The Bookseller, Walliams has sold 25.7 million books for HarperCollins since 2008, generating more than £153 million.

More than two decades after Little Britain, Walliams has also displayed a keen instinct for ideological calibration. Last year, on a podcast, he offered a fashionably up-to-date gloss on his own identity, reminiscing about going to gay clubs as a student, wearing skirts, and experimenting with his presentation before concluding: “I think in a way I’d probably say I am non-binary. I don’t know exactly.” It was a declaration that cost him nothing and signalled everything.

Yet, according to The Telegraph, in 2023 and 2024 — just as Walliams was publicly reflecting on his identity — he was the subject of an internal investigation at his former publisher, after a junior employee complained that he had sexually harassed her. The woman later left the company with a five-figure settlement. The paper further reports that female staff working with Walliams were advised to meet him only in pairs and not to visit his home. Walliams’s agent has said he was unaware of any such investigation at the time, adding that he “strongly denies that he has behaved inappropriately and is taking legal advice”.

Linehan’s contribution to ideological debates, by contrast, has been genuinely daring and heartfelt. In 2021, he briefly joined the lesbian dating app Her to draw attention to the routine inclusion of male users who identify as “transbians”. Rather than being applauded for highlighting the erosion of lesbian boundaries, he became the target of derision. His motives were impugned, his arguments dismissed, and a year later, the Father Ted musical, which he had described as his retirement plan, was axed.

More than a year after the HarperCollins investigation, but shortly before The Telegraph published its findings, Walliams was dropped as an author. His departure followed the exit of the company’s UK chief executive, Charlie Redmayne, and the appointment of Kate Elton.

Linehan has faced no allegations of sexual harassment. There was no internal investigation, no settlement, no discreet management of reputational risk, and no mollifying statement from an agent. His offence was ideological. He said what he believed repeatedly and publicly, and refused to recant. For that, he lost everything: his television career, professional relationships, reputation, and standing.

The lesson is not that Linehan should have been protected or that Walliams deserved destruction. It is that British cultural life now operates on a simple rule. Mouthing the correct platitudes is a shield. Say the right things, apologise on cue, and even the most tasteless or troubling conduct can be absorbed. Say the wrong things, particularly those deemed low status, and no amount of talent or prior success will save you. Small wonder, then, that Britain’s creative class is so timid; everyone knows where the gates are, and how easily they close.

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Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of Pornocracy.

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