Frances Barber’s Midnight Meltdown

Twitter. Some find it difficult to talk about. Others find it difficult to do. And someone who finds Twitter just a little too challenging at times - not to do, but to make sense of - is actor Frances Barber, who has form for late-night social media excursions of no fixed direction. On one memorable occasion, she even confessed to being Elephants Trunk and Mozart while in possession of a Twitter feed. Things have not changed of late.

Frances Barber - another Twitter wipeout

Her ranting at Scary Muslims (tm) has been the stuff of legend. Her visceral hatred of Jeremy Corbyn - rather challenging for someone who claims to be a Labour Party supporter - is also well-known. At the time of the Nice attack, she combined the two, to produce the kind of rant designed to satisfy the most discerning rant connoisseur. And now she has been on another late-night Twitter tirade against Labour.

Out of nowhere came the first salvo in her latest outburst: “My distress at @UKLabour knows no bounds. 41 years of support & belief. They are now Stalinists. And not even clever ones. Just thugs. A Clockwork Orange”. They do film re-enactments too? It must be a busy life in the Labour Party. But there just had to be more.

“If you think anti Semitic members taking over CLP [sic] all over the Country is simplistic, you haven’t read History”. Er, WHAT? Who mentioned anti-Semitism? What history of the Labour Party is this that she offers up? Who are these people “taking over CLPs”? We don’t get to find that out - it would mean detail, and Ms Barber doesn’t do detail.

What she does do is to find a convenient target to latch on to, and this time her unfortunate victim was Councillor Tris Osborne from the Medway area of Kent. The invitation was suitably sinister and threatening: “Come speak to me Tris. I have a complaint. And I’m so not anonymous”. Coun. Osborne has, understandably, now taken his account private.

This, of course, wouldn’t have anything to do with someone else trying to shout him down and get their pals to pile in on him. But even with only one side of the exchange, we can see the rant volume increasing: “I understand the Politburo has given you the party line. You did it well. But I think you underestimate the real fury of women in this debate”. There is now a Politburo in Labour! Things really more fast in this party!

They move so fast that Labour members - assuming Ms Barber still is one - can run their own transgender smears: “You mean Momentum. We all know that. A 19 year old boy who says he’s now a woman winning the Jo Cox award for women will just evaporate real females from @UKLabour . But you know that . And you hate women anyway, so you won’t care”. The spirit of tolerance is replaced by some other spirit. Allegedly.

In any case, by now she had lost it big time, howling incoherently “I think you underestimate Women. @UKLabour is now anti Semitic, misogynistic ,1970’s throwback to 3 day week pretend anti establishment, whilst mcClusky has a 2 mill pad at the Shard paid for my his members. You utter HYPOCRITE”. As Harold Macmillan once said at the United Nations, d’you think we could have an English translation of that?

Frances Barber’s screaming intolerance may be a good laugh, but some out there actually believe her bluster. For that reason alone, she should avoid the late night rants.