September 4, 2025

OUT ON A LIMB: Graham Linehan’s arrest shows we need a UK First Amendment.

The co-creator of Father Ted, Graham Linehan, was arrested at Heathrow Airport on Monday on suspicion of ‘inciting violence’. His crime? Criticising trans ideology on social media.

No sooner had Linehan disembarked his flight from Arizona than he was apprehended by armed police. In a post on Substack, he explained that his arrest was for three posts on X. One of the tweets read: ‘If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.’

The arrest at Heathrow was made by officers from the Met Police Aviation Unit. There are only 5,700 or so deployable armed police officers in England and Wales at present. Yet five of them were sent to arrest Linehan for his social-media posts. However you slice it, this was complete overkill – and a massive waste of police time. Worse, as a condition of bail, Linehan has been banned from using X. ‘A legal gag order designed to shut me up’ is how he describes it.*

Related: Graham Linehan accuser ‘is disgraced transgender police officer.’

A disgraced transgender police officer is believed to have reported gender-critic Father Ted creator Graham Linehan to the police over his social media posts.

Former Pc Lynsay Watson, who was born Alex Horwood, was sacked by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023 after allegedly harassing a free speech campaigner and critic of gender ideology.

An anonymous social media account, believed to be linked to Watson, boasted in April this year of reporting Linehan, the Father Ted writer and gender sceptic, to the police over several social media posts he made about transgender issues. The account encouraged other transgender activists to do the same.

Watson has a well-documented history of calling on police forces to pursue criminal investigations of campaigners who are sceptical of the belief that self-identification, and not biological sex, determines what a man or woman is.

* It’s not exactly working, as Linehan isn’t backing down:

UPDATE:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll