Whenever Stephen Fry is in the news, denouncing the centuries-old, expensive institutions that he frequents, I ask myself: who is this for? Is Stephen Fry’s fanbase really expecting the actor to cut ties with everyone he knows and spend his remaining years in comfortable retirement? Does Stephen Fry know that it’s 2024, and we’re a few years past needing to cancel every bakery and bar that doesn’t operate solely in the name of racial justice?
At the weekend, it was Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC)’s turn. Fry, who is the former president of the MCC, has said the 237-year-old club “stinks” of privilege. He added of his former stomping ground: “It has a public face that is deeply disturbing, sort of beetroot-coloured gentlemen in yellow-and-orange blazers sitting in this space in front of the Long Room and looking as if they’d come out of an Edwardian cartoon.” He isn’t wrong. Any club with a near-30-year waiting list to join, or a £45,000 fast-track to become an “associate member”, is likely to be full of tossers. But the problem with Fry’s condemnation is its desperation: he has paid for membership and partied in these institutions for years. It seems his objection is not about their nature: stuffy, exclusionary, male. Instead, it seems straightforwardly cynical – a shallow bid to appear in lockstep with contemporary mores.
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