I must confess that I have never enjoyed the off-stage antics of entertainers as I have since Trump was elected. I no longer need to suspend my imagination when, aware of their real personalities, I watch them acting in a way that is completely at odds with their real personalities. 

Hollywood is the home of faux reality, a society of faux marriages, faux outrage, walled estates and armed guards. From that protective enclave, Hollywood spewed spontaneous faux outrage at Trump’s border wall. And, seriously, you must remember the faux outrage of the English entertainers who gaslighted the British public over Brexit by promising shortages of food, medicine, employment and investment. Help! The sky will really fall in this time!

Perhaps medical science will discover one day that even appearing on television will so lobotomise a person that they will become convinced that they possess an encyclopedic knowledge that qualifies them to advise on any topic? Wasn’t it Hollywood that called for greater gun control when almost every film has one gunfight in which the good guy shoots twice as many as the man in black? Is it racist that Jackie Chan is denied a gun and must use only his hands and feet? 

Ricky Gervais obviously thought the hypocrisy so self-evident that he told a ballroom overfull with over-rich, Hollywood A-listers – the sort who take private jets to climate conferences — exactly what he thought about them: “You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.” That took courage; to sacrifice a future paying gig on the altar of truth.

However, if you are still in doubt about celebrity neural capacity, just consider the difference between lines delivered by actors that are written by other people, and the lines delivered by actors that they, themselves, wrote. You can almost hear their neurons grinding corn.

First, there is the erudite, anti-Trump, George Clooney, who as attorney Miles Massey in Intolerable Cruelty advises his client exactly what the scriptwriters told him to say: “So you propose, despite demonstrable infidelity on your part, your unoffending wife should be tossed out on her ear.” There is a moral concern in this reprimand. 

Then there is George Clooney, the self-described door to door insurance salesman, who when repeating his own writing lines, describes Donald Trump: “as a guy who takes a shit in a gold toilet;” and “who lives in a gold tower, when I see him say ‘Hollywood elite’; Hollywood elite? I don’t have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, Donald Trump has a star on Hollywood Boulevard! Fuck you!” Nothing moral there.

Another favourite of mine is Cher who once sang a song while sitting astride the barrel of a 14-inch cannon on the US battleship, Missouri. Men died on and from that ship but for Cher it was an opportunity as a prop for sex. Cher starred in a movie named Mermaids and her scrip writer presciently had her say: “I don’t always know what I’m doing. It’s not as if you and your sister came with a book of instructions.” She seemed so understanding of her own shortcomings as a mother. 

Cher became unhinged by Donald Trump’s presidency. So much so that she attributed all the deaths in the world to him in one unhinged rant: “There’s a blame 4 killing someone…its called “murder”. if you murder more than one person you are a mass murderer. there are many punishments for different degrees of murder, but when someone “knowingly “murders people… the punishment is death. Trump’s a mass murderer…” I suddenly feel sorry for Sony Bono. 

But things are just as bad in Old Blighty where that theatrical master, Hugh Grant, who once compared his own “profound narcissistic and sociopathic character in HBO’s The Undoing to President Trump, repeated his marriage proposal to Julie from the movie Sense and Sensibility, written, ostensibly, by Jane Austin, so gracefully: “I’ve come here with no expectations only to profess now that I am at liberty to do so that my heart is and always will be, yours.”

But those were the words of Austin. Mr Jekyll emerged when the words of Grant were directed at Boris Johnson after the UK PM announced the commencement of a negotiated exit from the European Union: “You will not fuck with my children’s future. You will not destroy the freedoms my grandfather fought two world wars to defend. Fuck off you over-promoted rubber bath toy. Britain is revolted by you and you little gang of masturbatory prefects.” Hugh was an Oxford alumnus — modern education for ya, ain’t it.

The US is facing three significant problems at the moment, each the result of Biden’s weak presidency: Russia is massing troops on Ukraine’s border for an invasion; China is rehearsing an invasion of Taiwan, and the teeming masses from Central America are swarming into the US from Mexico because there is no border. What have the Hollywood elite to say about them? Nothing!

Meanwhile, Hugh Grant’s emotional collapse over Brexit continues to be ignored in the genuine belief that that will be successful. A trial of that treatment to Hollywood was cancelled due to a timing conflict with the Oscars.

Dr David Long is a retired solicitor and economist.