Lily Allen – Useful Stooges

On Tuesday we took a brief look at Lily Allen, the British pop star who is, perhaps, known almost as well for her opinions as for her music. In late 2016, as we’ve seen, she sharply criticized her country’s government for not opening its gates to a flood of refugees, and made a public promise to take at least one of them into her Notting Hill home. Well, that never happened. By Christmas of that year she was making noise – and headlines – over that very residence. As it turned out, she had rented it to an Italian couple, and on December 4 she complained on Twitter that she was about to be homeless for the holidays: “Meant to be moving back into my flat this week, but my tenants just dropped that they can’t find anywhere to go up to their standards. Then they said they’re diplomats and have diplomatic immunity and there’s nothing I can do about it. So, who fancies a family of 3 for Xmas?”

It all turned out to be a lie. The Italian couple, Luca and Maria Bilotta, were simply taking a bit longer than expected to get all their stuff moved out, and had asked for two extra days to do so. “We are diplomats,” said Maria. “But I don’t want to make trouble to [sic] our embassy. This is so stupid. I can’t believe this.” The fracas caused widespread reaction. Why, asked some Brits, had Allen rented out her property to rich foreigners instead of filling it with refugees? “Thought she’d given up her home to refugees and they were actually diplomats!” cracked one Twitter wit. “I’m always making that mistake!”

Now, any one of the incidents we’ve mentioned would have caused an ordinary human being to be so paralyzed with embarrassment that he or she would disappear forever from social media and never again make a public statement about anything. Not Lily Allen! She has continued to spout off with the same breathtaking self-assurance. In January of this year, for example, she came up with a sort-of-defense for the so-called “grooming gangs” that raped over 1400 British girls and that are made up almost exclusively of Muslim men. Allen’s response to this catastrophe was to shift the focus to sexual assaults by non-Muslims: there are, she pointed out on Twitter, plenty of white British men who “have sex with their stepdaughters twice a week for years at a time.” The assailants aren’t just stepfathers, she added: they’re “neighbors, uncles, gardeners, priests, fast food restaurant managers that do it over and over again.” In fact, she tweeted, “there’s a strong possibility” that the girls raped by the grooming gangs “would have been raped and abused by somebody else at some point. That’s kind of the issue.”

When she was called out far and wide for her “vile,” “sick,” and “repugnant” attempt to deflect guilt away from Muslim men, Allen deleted her comments and apologized – sort of. “Being able to accept responsibility and apologize is a strength, not a weakness,” she insisted, ever impressed with herself.

Lily Allen is not terribly famous in the U.S., but in her homeland she’s quite the star. Born into a well-to-do showbiz family in London in 1985, she attended a series of posh schools which she was kicked out of for smoking and drinking. She became a drug dealer, got a record contract through family connections, and ended up hitting it big by posting her songs on My Space. Since then she’s pursued a busy recording and performing career – and insulted a long list of fellow artists and assaulted more than her share of paparazzi. But she’s also found time to lecture her inferiors about world affairs.

Hillary Clinton at the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen

On her Wikipedia page, one sentence after another is a head-scratcher. “On 1 October 2009, Allen and several other musicians released the world’s first digital musical petition aimed at pressuring world leaders attending the December 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen.” Digital music petition? What? “During the London assembly and mayoral elections in April 2016, Allen announced that she would be giving ‘half her vote to the Women’s Equality Party’ – by voting for them on the London-wide Assembly list but voting Labour elsewhere.” Who asked? “On 15 June 2017, Lily Allen became involved in a controversy over the number of deaths in the Grenfell Tower fire.” What kind of expertise does a dropout pop star have in such matters?

Grenfell Tower in west London after the fire

We looked that last one up. In an interview on Britain’s Channel 4 news the morning after the fire, Allen actually accused the government and media of lying about the number of fatalities, which at that moment was up to seventeen. Newsreader Jon Snow had to explain to her that, as is the case with many such tragedies, the figure being broadcast represented the number of bodies recovered so far, and that the death toll would surely rise significantly in the hours and days to come. But Allen didn’t back down: as far as she was concerned, there was a conspiracy afoot and she was a brave, lone truth-teller.

There’s more. In 2016, Allen visited the migrant camp in Calais, on the French side of the English Channel. The migrants are camped there because they want to cross the channel and settle in Britain, even though, as has been widely pointed out, they have no right under international law to enter the U.K. But that didn’t stop Allen from apologizing to one of the migrants, a teenage Afghan named Shamsher Sharin, on Britain’s behalf “for what we’ve put you through.” When a TV reporter challenged her during an October 2016 interview to, in effect, put her money where her mouth was, Allen said that “if these children are being displaced, of course, there’s room for people in my house. I’m going to take them in.” She backed the promise up with an Instagram post promising to take a refugee into her £2 million home in Notting Hill. When asked in January 2017 whether she had made good on her promise, however, she refused to answer. Soon after, the post on which she had made the promise disappeared from her Instagram feed.

To be sure, she had an excuse. Was it a good one? We’ll scrutinize it on Thursday.