Precisely why it took five armed policemen to detain him is unclear. But there they were as he stepped bleary-eyed off the plane after a sleepless 11-hour flight from Arizona to Heathrow.
By the time they had escorted him to a private area, Graham Linehan’s ‘offence’ had been explained to him. He was under arrest for a series of ‘anti-trans’ social media posts.
Astonishingly, this involved taking him to the airport police station where his trouser belt was removed and his bag and media devices confiscated. Then he was shown into a green-tiled cell with a bunk bed and a metallic toilet in the corner.
It was the beginning of yet another dark episode in the life of the comedy writer whose courageous and combative stance on gender ideology – some might even call it an obsession – has already cost him his career, his marriage, his friendships and very nearly his sanity.
And his detention is only the latest in a string of heavy-handed police responses over so-called ‘thought crimes’, with newspaper columnists, local councillors and parents on school WhatsApp groups also being targeted in recent months.
The most high profile case involved Lucy Connolly, the 42-year-old childminder who was released from prison last month after 377 nights behind bars for inciting racial hatred following a reckless post in the aftermath of the Southport murders.
Amid all this madness it is Linehan, the creator of the brilliant Father Ted, The IT Crowd and other TV comedy gold, whose vocal defence of women’s rights has made him a modern-day hero to some and a pariah to others.
And all because he dared challenge the orthodoxy of trans rights activism that declares a person with a penis can be a woman.
But what a price he has paid. Hounded and harried, it was not just his occupation that was cancelled, so too was his life. He may have written jokes for a living but there is nothing remotely funny about what has happened to this inherently decent and brave man.
During the campaign against him, which has been waged for more than seven years, Linehan, 57, has been branded a bigot, accused of harassment, banned from Twitter and reported to the police on multiple occasions. Officers have turned up at his home and family members have been attacked by online trolls.
His wife Helen, with whom he wrote the hugely popular series Motherland, was threatened and her address posted online. It was all too much for his marriage and the couple, who have two children, separated in 2020. Work dried up and friends he’d known all his life vanished, but somehow the resilient Linehan kept going.
‘I’ve been quoted as saying I contemplated suicide, but that’s not true,’ he once said.
‘I do remember looking at a bunch of high buildings and wondering which one would be tall enough to kill me. But when I joked about it to my therapist she said, ‘Don’t say that. That’s how it begins’.
‘So I immediately stopped and never thought about it again.’
Who could blame him if such troubling thoughts were resurrected after his arrival in Britain this week from his home in the US, where he has finally been able to rebuild his life. For his arrest ended with him being put under observation in hospital.
In characteristic style, Linehan shared the three tweets which, he says, led to him being met by police when he landed. Reading them it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry.
One in which he jocularly advocates striking a trans-identifying male in a woman-only space with a strategic punch to the genitals was reminiscent of how a new book claimed the Queen was reported to have reacted after being assaulted on a train as a teenager.
Writing on his Substack blog, Linehan eloquently described his arrest. ‘The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two – five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets.
‘In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).’
The first of the reposted offending tweets, ran: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.’
A second tweet consisted of a picture of a trans rally to which he had added the caption: ‘A photo you can smell.’
And the third was a follow up to this tweet which said: ‘I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** ’em.’
While some might be offended by the coarseness of the language, in the ugly world of social media it is hardly extreme.
What happened next, however, reveals how conventional common sense is being replaced by the drip, drip, drip of malevolent trans activism.
During his police interview, Linehan was questioned about each of the tweets with – as he puts it – ‘the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like – oh, I dunno – crime’.
He explained to the officers that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke. ‘Men who enter women’s spaces ARE abusers and they need to be challenged every time.’
His account of the police responses to his own questions is chilling. When he asked the officer what he meant by the phrase ‘trans people’, he reports him saying: ‘People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.’
Linehan replied: ‘Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned. He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language.’
In despair, he adds: ‘The damage Stonewall [the gay rights turned trans-activist charity] has done to the UK police force will take years to mend.’
By now the interview was affecting Linehan’s health and after a nurse checked his blood pressure – over 200, he says – he was taken to hospital where he was monitored for eight hours.
‘The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel it may also have been a contributing factor that I have now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, persistent harassment campaign because I refuse to believe that lesbians have c****.’
April’s Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex was supposed to draw a line under the incendiary debate which, at one stage, left Sir Keir Starmer floundering when he refused to say if a woman could have a penis. Tragically, Linehan’s arrest shows this is far from the case.
His transformation from comedy genius to unemployed outcast began in 2018. In hospital and under the influence of morphine following an operation for testicular cancer, he unthinkingly tweeted to express his support for feminist campaigners who were being persecuted by trans rights activists.
It was, he says, a tweet ‘no one could have a problem with, that said trans people should be respected but women need single-sex spaces’.
By the time the morphine had worn off, his battle with the trans lobby had started.
There were increasingly frenzied messages from opponents. One vile post declared: ‘I wish the cancer had won.’
His ordeal had begun. In short order he was about to lose everything: his family, his job and his reputation.
He became embroiled in a civil legal action with trans activist Stephanie Hayden, who was born male and holds a female gender recognition certificate.
As well as identifying as a woman, Hayden has issued multiple lawsuits against those who have challenged gender identity ideology, claiming to have suffered harassment.
Meanwhile, as a crescendo of hate descended on Linehan, who was accused of bigotry, half his 800,000 social media followers melted away.
‘The activists wrote to friends of mine who followed me saying: ‘Why are you following Graham Linehan, he’s a bigot’.’
As the campaign against him became increasingly venomous, friends told him to ‘shut up’ for his own good. But if he had hoped his comedy chums would rally round, Linehan was to be cruelly disappointed, as one by one they dropped him, too.
He was once close showbusiness friends with Matt Lucas and David Walliams – Linehan directed the Little Britain pilot. ‘They only got the meeting at the BBC because of me,’ he said. ‘Neither has had the guts to say: ‘I know Graham Linehan and he’s not a bigot’.’
Executives at the production companies who used to fall over themselves to wine and dine him in London’s most fashionable restaurants stopped taking his calls. One West End producer told him he was ‘on the wrong side of history’.
He was offered £200,000 to walk away from a planned musical of Father Ted – an almost guaranteed hit which he hoped would provide him with his pension – but turned it down because it was conditional on him having no creative involvement and being barred from rehearsals.
An offer to write for Hollywood stars Steve Martin and Martin Short was withdrawn after just five minutes, while a proposal to work on a companion piece to Peter Shaffer’s classic Black Comedy was terminated because the playwright’s estate didn’t want to be seen to be ‘taking one side or the other’.
Even a tour to to teach comedy was cancelled when the company claimed it ‘would not be able to afford the security’.
As Linehan explained in his bestselling memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made And Lost A Career In Comedy: ‘I discovered later this was a standard excuse given to those of us declared unclean by the new sacred class.’
When one actor friend, James Dreyfus, who appeared in Dr Who, did agree to show support he, too, was hounded by trans rights activists and had difficulty finding work.
Linehan asked him to sign a letter demanding Stonewall reconsider its stance on gender ideology. Not only did Stonewall flatly refuse to do so but Dreyfus suffered the consequences.
When a 50th anniversary compilation of Dr Who’s arch enemy, The Master – a character Dreyfus had played in audio productions – appeared in 2021, the credits featured every actor who had taken on the iconic role except for Dreyfus.
Linehan had not just blown up his career, his marriage also foundered. ‘A chasm was opening up between me and my wife as she watched me lose jobs and opportunities,’ he wrote. She was ‘looking for normality and I was perpetually dismayed and angry. She asked me to cease operations… but I couldn’t do it. I knew what everyone who’s in this fight knows – the gender Stasi never forgive.’
And judging by what happened this week, few will feel able to disagree. Linehan’s release on bail contained a single condition: he must not go on X, or Twitter as he still refers to the network.
‘That’s it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes – just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I’m in the UK and a demand I face a further interview in October.’
The absurdity of it all does not alter the fundamental reality of what happened to Graham Linehan. With a weary and pained denunciation of his treatment, he said: ‘I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online . . .
‘To me this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.’