We need to talk about Paddington. Britain’s obsession with the Peruvian bear has long been unhealthy. But for a fictional character from a children’s story to be transformed into the moral voice of the nation is truly deranged.
This week brings yet another reminder of the godlike status now afforded to Michael Bond’s creation. Earlier this month, at the end of a drunken night out, two RAF engineers stole a statue of the bear that was attached to a bench in the author’s hometown of Newbury, Berkshire. CCTV captured Daniel Heath and William Lawrence removing the statue and transporting it, via a taxi, to their nearby RAF base.
This was a stupid thing to do and the pair are, rightly, said to be ‘extremely ashamed about their decisions’. Appearing in court this week, they admitted criminal damage. They were fined £2,275 each and sentenced to 150 hours of community service. In a sane country, that would be the end of it. But this was a statue of Paddington, ‘a beloved cultural icon’, as district judge Sam Goozee informed the court in his summing up, proving we are indeed not a sane country.
Goozee appeared to have lost all capacity to distinguish fact from fiction, the twee from the serious, and the realm of childhood from the adult world. ‘[Paddington’s] famous label attached to his duffle coat says: “Please look after this bear”’, he said. This was all just preamble to his killer line: ‘Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.’
Sorry, what? To state the bleeding obvious: Paddington is not real. All he ‘stands for’ is the genius of Bond’s imagination. Yet, as the judge’s disappointed scolding makes clear, this character from a 1960s kids’ book has been DEI-ified. ‘He represents kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society’, said Goozee. In attacking Paddington, Heath and Lawrence’s real crime was not vandalism, but blasphemy against diversity, equity and inclusion.
Paddington’s rise to becoming the nation’s moral conscience has been long in the making, so perhaps it’s unfair to single out Goozee in particular for succumbing to this mania. It began when the stories moved from paperback to screen, and from the beautiful line-drawn and stop-motion animations of the 1970s to 21st-century CGI. When the first new Paddington movie was released in 2014, his fumbling politeness, home in London and fondness for marmalade portrayed a saccharine form of national identity that liberals could get behind. His place in the nation’s affections was sealed when he was given a starring role in Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations in 2022.
Paddington is more than simply iconic. His status as a refugee from ‘Darkest Peru’, who is dependent upon the kindness of strangers, has transformed him into a paragon of pro-immigration virtue. Paddington’s migrant background was hardly remarked upon in the 1960s and 1970s, the heyday of Bond’s children’s books. Yet, by 2025, London mayor Sadiq Khan could drag Paddington into the 2025 New Year’s Eve firework display and we all knew what this was supposed to represent.
Paddington is, we are told, a representative of diverse Britishness. But this is bizarre. Unable to name real historical heroes, including the many Brits of migrant backgrounds who have made their mark, the cultural elites resort to celebrating a fictional character. It’s as if these people are unable to make the case either for British values or mass migration and so hide behind poor old Paddington.
Perhaps the very attraction of Paddington as a national symbol over, say, Shakespeare or Churchill, rests on the fact that he is made up. Real people exist within a particular time period and tend to reflect that era’s values. Real people often have messy personal lives – few of us are unambiguously good or bad. But moral purity and all manner of values can be ascribed to fictional bears. They never disappoint.
The judge’s reaction to the stolen statue shows us that Britain’s ruling classes have lost the plot. When it comes to Paddington, they don’t see a cute children’s teddy bear. To them, that statue is a religious relic that must be protected at all costs. For this reason, Daniel Heath and William Lawrence’s straightforward act of vandalism has been treated as something far graver than it was.
It’s not two drunken idiots we need to worry about – but the insanity and shallowness of our elites.
Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. She is a visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Hungary.
