“When words mean nothing we can’t talk anymore.” So declared Laurence Fox after exiting the High Court. It was an odd turn of phrase given he’d just lost a libel case.

The actor turned political agitator, having criticised a decision by Sainsbury’s to celebrate Black History Month, referred to a former Stonewall trustee and a drag artist as paedophiles, something Mrs Justice Collins Rice decided was “harmful, defamatory and baseless”.

As a result those words certainly will mean something for Mr Fox – an as-yet-to-be-decided bill for damages.

How did a middling actor best known for an Inspector Morse spin-off become one of Britain’s most controversial commentators? And where does he go from here?

In the blood

Mr Fox comes from an acting family. His father, James, found fame playing a series of patrician characters in films like The Servant, The Remains of the Day and Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. Uncle Edward Fox (The Day of the Jackal) and Cousin Emilia Fox (The Pianist) demonstrate that acting is very much in the blood.

Laurence attended the prestigious Harrow public school - £16,850 per term in 2023-24 - but, by his own account his time there was not a happy one. He told The Telegraph in 2002 there was a “mad, crappy system of pointless violence and intimidation” and, perhaps surprisingly given his recent public pronouncements, decried the racism and homophobia he encountered there, as well as the system of ‘fagging’ – doing demeaning chores for more senior pupils.

Mr Fox was expelled – “something to do with a girl at a dance” – and despite being allowed to sit his A Levels, the school wrote such a scathing report about him that no university would accept him.

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Raised as an evangelical Christian – James Fox took an extended break from acting after finding religion to go door-to-door as an evangelist – he has spoken of his disdain for organised religion and, in the years after being kicked out of Harrow, drifted.

Eventually he decided to follow his father into the acting profession he was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Despite being, in his own words “treated like a nonce” for his public school connections he impressed enough to win roles in horror thriller The Hole starring Keira Knightley and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, defying a ban on students taking professional roles to do so.

After graduating in 2001 he took roles as Nazis in Island At War and The Last Drop, as well as playing a British soldier in Colditz, which earned him his most famous role.

Dapper detective

“I caught the last 10 minutes of the ITV1 film of Colditz, and saw this young English boy going bonkers and wandering out to be shot, and I thought: 'He's interesting.',” Kevin Whateley, the titular character on the Inspector Morse spin-off Lewis told The Independent of Mr Fox.

On the recommendation of the man he called ‘King Kev’ – and despite never having seen an episode of Morse – the 27-year-old was cast as Lewis’ partner DS James Hathaway, a chain-smoking public schoolboy with familial issues.

The show’s pilot, ‘Reputation’, was ITV’s most-watched drama of the year and Fox would play the role for nine years, from 2006 to 2015.

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The same year Lewis debuted he met the popstar-turned-actress Billie Piper, best known for her roles in Doctor Who and Secret Diary of a Call Girl. They married the following year and had two sons before divorcing in 2016.

In recent years “I see your dad’s taking the divorce well” has become internet shorthand for the cringe-inducing behaviour of middle-aged men. ‘Divorced guy energy’ has its own entry on Wiktionary, and GQ has described it as “both a meme and an identity”.

Kanye West, Elon Musk and Graham Linehan have all been accused of possessing divorced guy energy, but arguably none has embodied it like Mr Fox.

Not so fantastic

Ms Piper was granted a quickie divorce from Mr Fox citing – unspecified – “unreasonable behaviour”. Mr Fox has admitted he did not take it well, telling The Mirror he suffered from exhaustion and panic attacks. A custody battle for their kids followed which the former Lewis actor described as “pretty brutal”.

He told The Times in 2020: “It’s believe the woman. No! Don’t believe the woman. Provide the evidence. Provide this evidence. Try me as a f****** criminal, man, and let’s see how far you get. This is a poison in our culture, and it’s wrong.”

Mr Fox denied during his libel trial that he’d been set on his anti-woke crusade by his divorce, but he certainly followed the lead of another famous divorced dad, this time The Simpsons’ Kirk van Houten, by embarking on a music career, the first released just before the marriage officially ended.

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It was while promoting his second album, A Grief Observed, that the actor first became known to the wider public as a culture warrior, though he’d been posting about ‘woke culture’ online since then, having admitted to being radicalised by YouTube videos. During an excruciating appearance on BBC Question Time, he clashed with an audience member about racism, sparking a backlash both online and in person. Brother-in-law Richard Ayoade was, Mr Fox says, “furious” and told him he’d “never encountered racism”. The latter replied that he’d experienced “deferential” racism while working as a safari driver in Kenya.

The war on woke

If ever a man embodied the mantra of Scots comedian Limmy – “don’t back doon: double doon” – it’s Mr Fox.

Following his appearance on Question Time he attracted further flak for urging Brits to ignore social distancing and lockdown measures, and complaining of ‘forced diversity’ in First World War Film 1917 due to the – historically accurate – presence of a Sikh soldier. It was a complaint which called to mind the ‘anti-woke’ complainants about the 2017 Doctor Who episode Empress of Mars which featured a black soldier in the Victorian army. There were black men in the British army of the time, but it seems the culture warriors’ suspension of disbelief extends to a 1,000-year-old alien from the planet Gallifrey, travelling around time and space in a box which is bigger on the inside, dealing with a tribe of reptilian Ice Warriors on Mars, but not to diverse casting.

Mr Fox has subsequently decried the taking of the knee, posted images of himself in blackface – he stated on Twitter he had “racially transitioned” – and tweeted an image of a swastika made from the LGBTQ+ Pride flag.

The last drew a rebuke from the Campaign Against Antisemitism which noted that, along with Jewish people, LGBT groups were murdered by the Nazis.

Mr Fox stood to be mayor of London in 2021 – losing his deposit – and was arrested by police on suspicion of conspiring to commit criminal damage to Ulez cameras last year.

Finally, this week, he lost a libel ruling against the two people he had branded paedophiles. The 45-year-old had counter-sued after being called a racist, which the judge did not rule on.

Where Mr Fox goes from here is not clear. His political ambitions appear to have been thwarted and his last acting role came playing Hunter Biden in a film distributed by Breitbart News, an American website described by its former executive chairman Steve Bannon as “a platform for the alt-right”.

He has said he intends to appeal the libel ruling.