Dawn French has revealed she dumped a former love interest – because he was a Tory.
Speaking on the How to Wow podcast, the 63-year-old Vicar of Dibley star said: “I did have a nice time with one chap. He was quite posh.
“I thought, ‘I can’t go any further, I can’t think what it is, you’re attractive, I’ve got the right underwear on. I worked out what it was. He was a Tory!’”
French also joked that she “wouldn’t say no” to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer. “I think he’s good for Labour,” she said. “I mean I wouldn’t say no. Well I probably would say no as I’m married. He’s a very attractive man but that’s not the point. He’s going to do the business.”
It is the latest foray into Britain’s never-ending culture wars from French, after it emerged over the weekend that the Vicar of Dibley will take a knee and deliver a sermon about Black Lives Matter when the show returns for a Christmas special.
The vicar will acknowledge that Dibley, a fictional rural village in Oxfordshire, could certainly be more diverse, saying: “I don’t think it matters where you’re from. I think it matters that you do something about it because Jesus would, wouldn’t he?”
She continues: “Until all lives matter the same, we are doing something very wrong.”
“We need to focus on justice for a huge chunk of our countrymen and women who seem to have a very bad, weird deal from the day they’re born.”
She then makes a reference to taking down old notices in the village, which could be a nod to taking down statues with links to slavery, saying:
“I think that in Dibley perhaps we should think about taking down some of these old notices like this and that and perhaps we should put up one like this instead.”
She then puts a home-made Black Lives Matter poster to the church noticeboard before taking the knee in the style of NFL footballers in the US.
Many people have supported the moves, but others were less happy.
Laurence Fox was – predictably – one of the first to respond, tweeting that the BBC’s “virtuous false enlightenment allows them to ignore the charter to educate the great unwashed”.
But it was ex-UKIP leader Gerard Batten who was the most incensed…
Related: Right-wing fury as Vicar of Dibley set to ‘take the knee’ and deliver BLM sermon