The Free Press
I Posted on X. The British Police Arrested Me.
I was arrested at Heathrow, thrown in a cell, rushed to the hospital as my blood pressure spiked, and then silenced online—all for posting on social media.
By Graham Linehan
09.02.25 —
You may not know Graham Linehan’s name. But you should. The Irish comedian and co-creator of the popular sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd was long considered one of the most successful comedy writers in the United Kingdom.
Then he became one of Britain’s most outspoken critics of trans ideology. First Linehan was criticized for a 2008 episode of The IT Crowd which activists called transphobic when it re-aired years later. Then, in 2018, Linehan praised as “heroes” protesters at London’s Pride Parade who had carried banners that read “transactivism erases lesbians.” Ever since, Linehan has been the target of a relentless campaign by trans activists. He has been sued, repeatedly banned from X, and ostracized from the showbiz community. Linehan has said that accusations of transphobia have made it impossible for him to find work in Britain. Last year, he moved to the United States.
On Monday, Linehan was arrested by British police at Heathrow Airport, thrown in a cell, then rushed to the hospital for dangerously high blood pressure. All of this for the crime of three posts on X in April.
Today, we bring you Graham Linehan’s story, told from his hospital bed. —The Editors
Something odd happened before I even boarded my flight from Arizona to London. When I handed over my passport at the gate, the official told me I didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, had made a phone call.
The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three posts on X. In a country where pedophiles escape prison, where knife crime is out of control, the state had mobilized five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for these three posts (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).
When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists,” I said. The officers didn’t react.
This was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank and file of the police, there was a sort of polite bafflement. They were entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.
Once the officers began reading me my rights, and I realized what was happening, the red mist descended. The officers saw how upset I was and treated me gently after that. They even arranged for a van to meet me on the tarmac so I didn’t have to be perp-walked through the airport like a terrorist. Small mercies.
At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small, green-tiled cell with a bunk and a silver toilet in the corner.
Later, during my interview with an officer, the tone shifted. He asked about each of the posts in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like. . . oh, I don’t know—crime?
I explained that the post about punching a trans-identified man in a female-only space was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women’s spaces are abusers, and they need to be challenged every time.
The officer mentioned the term trans people. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth,” he said.
“Assigned at birth?” I responded. “Our sex isn’t assigned.” He called it semantics. I told him he was using activist language.
Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200 mm Hg—stroke territory. So, I was escorted to the emergency room, where I wrote this piece after spending about eight hours under observation.
The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel a contributing factor might have been that I’ve now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, persistent harassment campaign, all because I refuse to believe that men can become women.
I was offered bail, on one condition: I am not to go on X. That’s it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes—just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I’m in the UK, and a demand I face another police interview in October.
The fact that the individual officers were civil doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of what happened. I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to the hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online—all because I made jokes on X.
The UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.
This piece was originally published on Graham Linehan’s Substack, The Glinner Update.
Graham Linehan
Graham Linehan is an Irish comedian and co-creator of the sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd.
National Review
England’s Arrest of Graham Linehan Was an Act of Calculated Tyranny
By Charles C. W. Cooke
September 2, 2025 7:19 PM
The country’s illiberalism toward speech about transgenderism shocks even me.
Here is the first line of a story in today’s Guardian, a British newspaper:
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The writer of TV’s Father Ted has been arrested at Heathrow over three social media posts on transgender issues.
block quote end
If you click the link and scroll down, you’ll see that there is more to the piece than that one sentence. But there doesn’t need to be. The whole tale is contained within those 19 words. If you read on, you will find no complicating factors or exculpatory details or sins of omission. The news is exactly as it appears: In England, yesterday afternoon, the police deliberately arrested a man who was flying in from the United States because he had expressed views on Twitter that the British government does not like. England — not North Korea, or Russia, or China. England — the land of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Paine and Monty Python. For tweets on transgender issues. Tweets — not threats of imminent violence, or a credible vow to blow up the airport upon arrival. Tweets — on issues about which people profoundly disagree.
Since I moved to the United States in 2011, I have been chronicling the increasingly illiberal attitude to free expression that has been adopted in my country of birth. But this one, I will confess, surprised even me. Typically, I appeal to the First Amendment as the quintessential example of how things ought to be. Here, I do not have to go that far. Here, it is the British censorial attitude, not American permissiveness, that is the outlier on the world stage. I have no brief for Canada or Germany or New Zealand, but, bad as they may be when compared to the United States, I cannot imagine that any of them would have engaged in the same behavior given the same facts. This one was egregious on an entirely new scale.
The worst part, I think, is that it happened at Heathrow Airport. Why? Because that confirms that it was planned. Sometimes, police officers overreact or act rashly or misinterpret the law. But this was as deliberate and premeditated as it gets. Having seen a trio of social-media posts of which it disapproved, the Metropolitan Police saw fit to track a man down as he traversed international waters, and to intercept him before he could enter the country. To achieve this end, moreover, they sent no fewer than five officers — enough to staff a basketball team — the better to ensure that they had a policeman for each leg, a policeman for each thumb, and, just in case their target were to shout out defiantly to a phone-wielding assistant, a policeman to cover his mouth for good measure. I am making light of it, yes. But, in effect, that was the play: to use the power of the British government to silence a dissenting voice online. As it now stands, Graham Linehan has been bailed pending further investigation — of what, one must ask — with a single stipulation having been attached to his release: that he stay away from Twitter for the duration.
The nature of his arrest renders the contrast as clear as it could possibly be. Yesterday, Linehan was in the United States — living his life, sharing his opinions, enjoying his independence. Today, he is in England — under observation, subject to surveillance, at liberty only if he vows not to speak where people might hear. This is not, I’m afraid to say, one of those questions of taste: In this matter, America has got it right, and England has got it wrong. What was done to Graham Linehan was an act of calculated tyranny of the sort to which the British have become far too accustomed in recent decades. In other circumstances, they would be likely able to see this. Were an Englishman to fly to Russia and be arrested for making jokes or pointed comments, the contours would at once seem familiar. But with transgenderism as the topic, “hate” as the justification, and the United States as the foil, a myopia descends.
I cannot quite put my finger on why, but, all in all, it seems to me wholly appropriate that, immediately after Linehan was arrested for speaking, he was taken to an NHS-run hospital to recover. That, evidently, is the new British mode. In the year 2025, Britain has a parliament that can meet to help you kill yourself, but not to protect your speech; an exchequer that can pluck the population’s feathers from 9,000 different angles, but that has no interest in generating wealth; and a network of police forces that are incapable of solving the most sordid crimes imaginable, but that are sufficiently well-staffed to guarantee that if an outspoken Irish comedian steps off a plane from Arizona, he will be met by enough lawmen to fill a small office. During the worst days of Covid-19, the British government instructed the population to sacrifice every last human desire it had to ensure the survival and comfort of their state-provided nurses. Mercifully, that virus has mostly disappeared. Regrettably, it has been replaced by another one — and, this time, there is no antidote available but sustained mass revolt.
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