Weekend Thoughts

Fawlty Britain

John Cleese is most famous for being part of the Monty Python sketch show and for being the centre of a sitcom, Fawlty Towers. Recently, Cleese said on X that he would back Rupert Lowe and his Restore Britain message.

Cleese has a history of being populist and having right-leaning views, and has notoriously been called out by Sadiq Khan. However, what has changed now isn't Cleese's idiotic rhetoric but the culture in which he is working. Instead of going through everything he's done and making the record straight — because that's boring and farcical — it is more revealing to return to one of the main characters he played in the 1970s, an archetypal English Conservative, and to demonstrate how far Britain has regressed. His character's conservatism would now be seen as moderate, and that tells us something about a society drifting toward a more continental style of far-right activism.

I loved Fawlty Towers as a child, but looking back now I'm shocked, and hesitant to say whether any of the comedy is worth watching today. Its legendary status comes partly from its brevity: only twelve episodes, produced between 1975 and 1979. At the centre of it was Basil Fawlty, a struggling hotel owner in Torquay, navigating the aftermath of Britain's 1975 vote on Common Market membership.

One overlooked moment reveals Basil's political outlook: in one episode, Bassi quietly admits his hesitation about the Common Market vote, hinting at scepticism toward Harold Wilson's European policy. This sits alongside his infamous goose-stepping scene in "The Germans," where he insults German guests while simultaneously revealing his own trauma about national decline. In the same episode, he recoils in horror at an Afro-Caribbean doctor — a moment that exposes the rawness of his racial anxieties.

The show was written to mock him, not endorse him. We laugh at a man who is classist, racist, sexist, and obsessed with wealth and prestige — a man whose worldview is brittle, anxious, and deeply insecure. This is where an Augustinian reading becomes illuminating. Basil is not simply duplicitous; he is, in Augustine's terms, a man with disordered loves. He longs for an impeccably ordered hotel, convinced that bureaucratic incompetence is dragging it into chaos, yet he himself is the source of that chaos. Pride displaces duty; status displaces charity; hierarchy displaces truth. His moral personality is fractured. Self-deception governs him. His obsession with the "right sort" of customer or the "right sort" of image becomes his undoing.

Throughout the series, Basil chases a fantasy of class and status. He fawns over a titled guest who turns out to be a crook, and dismisses a "commoner" who turns out to be an undercover detective. His contempt for Manuel, the Spanish waiter, reads as post-imperial disdain mixed with fear of bureaucracy and foreignness. Basil's relationship with Manuel is at the crux of the show's comedy, but it is also its darkest, revealing not Manuel but Basil's own dark psychology — the same disordered-loves pattern, now directed at Manuel. The comedy is not in Basil's politics but in the tragedy of his character: a man undone by his own moral failings.

Basil is not a man recalling a better Britain from a position of security; he is permanently in debt, permanently failing to make the hotel pay, presiding over an economy that seems to reward everyone except him — the modernising, professionalising forces reorganising the industry around him, the aristocracy he fawns over and never joins. There was no golden era even inside the fiction. Basil's 1970s is not a lost paradise being betrayed by decline; it is his own moment of economic precarity, and his resentment is aimed almost entirely at the wrong target. He rages at foreigners, at the working-class guests he despises, at anyone beneath him in status — never at the actual conditions producing his anxiety. That misdirection is the most damning thing about him, and it is also the clearest throughline to the present: not a man watching his country decline from strength, but a man losing ground and blaming the people nearest to him for it.

Contextualising this matters because our own political moment is harsher than the 1970s. Rupert Lowe, formerly chairman of Southampton Football Club and now a political figure, represents a new kind of right-wing activism. It would be tempting to reach for the single damning soundbite — the leader who wants to jail the bureaucracy — but the record offers something quieter and, in its way, more revealing. Lowe has said publicly that "the failing civil service must be personally held to account,"¹ and in committee hearings he has gone further than the usual language of ministerial scrutiny, accusing named officials of fraud rather than mere incompetence. But for Lowe, there is no single outburst here to be embarrassed by afterwards, no comeuppance built into the format. It is a posture, repeated across dozens of sessions, and it has had time to settle into something closer to policy instinct than temper. Basil's prejudices always discharged themselves in a single scene and were punished by the plot for it. This doesn't discharge. It accumulates. This is not the Fawlty-style conservatism of petty snobbery and social anxiety. It is something more continental, more severe, and more dangerous.

John Cleese's backing of Rupert Lowe signals something dangerous and counterintuitive about the legacy of Fawlty Towers. Basil's stereotyping of migrants and his overall conservative disposition were part of a comedy that the audience was laughing at — his outlandish views, his prejudices, put on display for ridicule. Yet in the current climate, these attitudes are stripped of their theatricality and presented as facts. Indeed, the suppressed anger that Basil feels about life is now perceived as a justified resentment. The populist narrative has reformulated that idea not as tragic comedy but as something real and in need of expression. Something like this dilutes our current political discourse — and in offering that support, however privately, Cleese has ironically confirmed the very critique levelled at him: that he is partially endorsing Basil's personal beliefs, and that' in itself is no laughing matter.

¹ Rupert Lowe MP (@RupertLowe10), X, 21 March 2026, https://x.com/RupertLowe10/status/2035371818056319184.