23 July 2026 - 4:00pm
Jameela Jamil — actress, presenter, and the world’s most prominent sapiosexual — is in the news again, with a clip of her appearance on the Yestergays podcast going viral. Jamil was at the height of her powers during the late 2010s, when she was treated to puff pieces in Vogue with headlines dubbing her a “force for revolutionary self-acceptance”. Her views were trans-inclusive, body-positive, intersectional. She deftly positioned herself as an outsider by criticising more famous women celebrities on suitably feminist grounds: the Kardashians for being “double agents of the patriarchy”, Cardi B for promoting dangerous beauty fads. Jamil was the political trendsetter for a generation of angry young women.
All the hackneyed, predictable views of the celebrity activist in their late-2010s pomp are on display in the Yestergays clip. Their datedness is stamped by a lame allusion to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and some handwringing over Brexit, which somehow “paved the way for American chaos”.
Asked, innocuously, about her character in comedy series The Good Place, Jamil replied: “I had to make her a bit more of a bitch.” Her character was written as sweet because “Americans think British people are so sweet” — what, one wonders, about all those RP-speaking villains in classic Hollywood movies? Jamil, when she moved from Britain to America, had a moral responsibility to correct the record. Her character’s bitchiness in The Good Place had to be dialled up a notch because “British people are truly the most evil people in history.” She added: “They are Thanos. Britain is Thanos. They owe 43 trillion to India. We colonised the world.”
“They”, “we”: observe the switching pronouns. Jamil is of Indian and Pakistani heritage, but she was born in Hampstead and grew up in several other leafy London suburbs. When she calls for Britain to give India 43 trillion — assuming she means dollars, this would be roughly 10 times Britain’s GDP — does she imagine herself to be on the giving or receiving end?
Jamil seems, in any case, relieved to no longer be living on this side of the Atlantic. “Britain is fucked” is a sentiment with which many, across the political spectrum, rightly or wrongly agree. The claim that there is “literally a race war happening right now”, however, is one that could only come from either of the more extreme fringes.
The most evil people in history. One can think of several other plausible contenders: the Germans or the Japanese under their fascist governments, the Hutus during the Rwandan Genocide. The Thanos parallel is, however, intriguing. In the MCU, Thanos is not “evil” for the sake of it. Instead, he is a David Attenborough-style degrowther, who believes that environmental catastrophe can be averted only through a radical reduction of the universe’s population. The stronger analogy here — the one which would spring to any more historically-informed mind — is actually between Thanos and India after independence from the British Empire. It is the campaign of mass sterilisation waged by Indira Gandhi in the late Seventies.
What’s more, the British Empire was not a unique phenomenon. To call it uniquely evil betrays a certain parochialism and ignorance of history. Why should “the British” be singled out, even among the empire-building peoples of modern Europe? Britain’s empire was not obviously any worse than, say, that of the French; most would agree that it was a good deal better than Leopold II’s in the Congo. If it was motivated by a lust for profit — supposedly for 43 trillion — then one can still imagine worse motivations. The Nazi empire in Europe, to give the obvious example, was motivated by a lust for Lebensraum and racial purity. And who stood against that empire? That would be the British, “the most evil people in history”.
