Name: John Cleese.
Age: 78.
Appearance: What John Cleese looks like.
Ah, yes. Tall chap. Britain’s last non-ironic moustache. That’s him, but not for much longer.
Is he shaving it off? Not as far as I know.
Shrinking? I doubt it. But he is leaving the country.
Which country? Doesn’t he live in Los Angeles? He did. And he had an apartment in New York. But that was in the 80s, 90s and 00s, during his middle two marriages. After that, he moved to Monaco to reduce his tax bill, and to help pay alimony to his third ex-wife.
I see. So now he’s leaving Monaco? Nope. He felt like “a fish out of water” there, he said, so he moved back to his place in London in 2013.
A fish called wander! Never try to be funny again.
Sorry. But now he’s leaving London? Not exactly. He’s also had a house in Bath since at least 2010. And that has been his main home for the past few years. I think that’s right.
But he’s leaving Britain at least? Yes!
Finally. On Tuesday, in a rather irritable chat on Newsnight, he said he would be off in November.
Why? “I’m very disappointed with the way the country’s run,” he said.
Aren’t people in democracies bound to feel that way at least half the time? I guess.
And don’t quite a lot of 78-year-olds worry about the state of the country? A bit like all 10-year-olds do the dances out of Fortnite. There’s some truth in that. But in Cleese’s case, “my particular beef is with the newspapers”.
Oh. Don’t worry, he doesn’t mean us. It’s the rightwing press he means. He campaigned for proportional representation and the Leveson reforms, but it seems that Brexit’s broken him.
I think everyone in Britain knows that feeling. As he told Emily Maitlis: “I just thought to myself: ‘All right, I give up. I’ll try something else.’”
So where’s he off to? The island of Nevis in the Caribbean.
Isn’t that on the EU’s tax-haven blacklist, if I remember rightly? You remember wrongly. Nevis has now been promoted to the greylist, because they have promised to stop being a dodgy tax haven eventually.
Ah well, I’m sure the streets of London or Bath, or wherever, will miss Cleese’s silly walk. I doubt that. “I’ve only been in this country two weeks this year,” he says.
Do say: “I’ve had enough of this country! I’m going to stop visiting it occasionally.”
Don’t say: “Right, which of my homes have I not lived in yet?”
