Britain’s Buffoonery Puts Mr. Bean to Shame

The U.K. government can be as incompetent, but not as lovable, as the comedic icon.

By Louise Perry

Photo: Reuters/Hollie Adams

An American arrives in London. He insists that his government is persecuting him because he is black, Jewish and a Mormon. He also says he is seeking “humanitarian protection from violent homosexuality.” He claims asylum in the U.K.

What does a sensible government do in this situation? Well, here is what the British government did. Olabode Shoniregun, formerly of Las Vegas, was put up in a London hotel for eight months at taxpayers’ expense. When eventually instructed to leave the country, Mr. Shoniregun refused and was accommodated in government housing—again, at taxpayers’ expense.

Fourteen months after arriving, Mr. Shoniregun is still in Britain, having shuttled between various taxpayer-funded services, while also spending some time sleeping on the streets.

All this time, Mr. Shoniregun has been documenting his life on social media. He has posted videos of himself unpacking designer clothes in his taxpayer-funded hotel room, ordering room service and going out drinking. This is how the British media picked up on what was going on: Mr. Shoniregun told us.

One widely accepted psychological theory about comedy is that it is a response to incongruity. Humor arises when there is a mismatch between what we expect and what occurs. Think of the joke that every parent has surely played with his or her child at least once: putting random objects on your head and asking, “Is this a hat?” to roars of toddler laughter. It’s funny, because it’s wrong.

Mr. Shoniregun’s adventures have been repeatedly described as “farcical” in the media. The idea of taxpayers being forced by the government to spend large sums funding this man’s stay in the country provokes both outrage and, weirdly, laughter. This urge to laugh is a response to incongruity. You wouldn’t expect a country to be governed like this.

I’ve started to think of this phenomenon as “Mr. Bean Authoritarianism,” after the comic character played by Rowan Atkinson, one of Britain’s most successful comedy exports. Mr. Bean is childish and incompetent. He constantly gets things wrong. He can’t understand the most basic facts about everyday life, which results in various slapstick disasters.

The British government frequently manifests Mr. Bean-style incompetence but without his genial manner.

Take what one newspaper has called “the most expensive email in history,” sent by an anonymous member of the armed forces in 2022. It accidentally revealed the identities of about 18,700 Afghans who had been working with British forces. The government responded to the leak by offering to resettle these Afghan people in Britain, a project costing billions of pounds. A U.K. court granted a superinjunction, forbidding journalists from reporting on what had happened or even the existence of the injunction for almost two years. This scandal represents the essence of Mr. Bean Authoritarianism: blundering and censorial.

The recent media interest in Mr. Shoniregun is particularly unfortunate, from the government’s perspective, since the use of hotels to house asylum seekers has been the focus of extraordinary public anger, including rioting. In 2024 the government spent £3.1 billion on housing tens of thousands of asylum seekers in hotels, despite frequent local resistance. Last year at least 200 residents of these hotels were charged with a criminal offense, including a case of sexual assault in the small town of Epping that attracted months of protests.

In characteristic Mr. Bean fashion, the offender in that case—an Ethiopian national found guilty of sexually assaulting a woman and a 14-year-old girl—was accidentally released from prison and then wandered off into London. Police recovered him only after a public appeal for information, which included closed-circuit TV footage of the wanted man in his prison sweatsuit carrying a tote bag covered with a pattern of avocados. The photo was so incongruous, you almost had to laugh.

There’s a childishness to Mr. Bean Authoritarianism. Take the recent video game produced by the British government, “Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism.” The game encourages young people to learn about the risks of right-wing extremism by following the journey of a cartoon character named Charlie. Think the Obama administration’s interactive website feature, “The Life of Julia,” but with a more censorious message.

The game warns users against the risks of “ideological thoughts,” joining protests against the “erosion of British values” or even researching immigration statistics online, all under threat of being reported to the authorities.

The kindergarten aesthetics of the “Pathways” game have provoked much merriment among commentators, with one young, purple-haired female character becoming the subject of endless jokes on social media. The game is funny because it so wildly misjudges its target audience. Its designers seem to think that teenage boys seething against the political establishment—so angry that they’re on the cusp of planning terrorist atrocities—will be receptive to a game that addresses them as if they were errant preschoolers.

“Pathways” isn’t the first example of government messaging that treats the British public like naughty children. In 2023, Police Scotland came up with another, much-mocked cartoon character called “the hate monster.” “Before ye know it, ye’ve committed a hate crime,” announced the voice-over, with an effect that was simultaneously sinister and risible. “You are constantly on the brink of criminalization,” the ad implicitly told us. “Now look at this silly cartoon.”

Incompetence and authoritarianism are often bedfellows. Governments that frequently make mistakes will feel compelled to hide those mistakes, for fear of the public’s response.

The British government has dug itself into a particularly difficult rut. It is struggling to govern a country suffering both from falling living standards and rising social tension. Labour currently has less than 20% support among voters, a new low for a British governing party. In some parts of Britain, voters share a view of the country that is “nothing short of apocalyptic,” as one veteran pollster wrote last year.

None of this is funny, not even slightly. The urge to laugh at examples of Mr. Bean Authoritarianism derives only from the sheer wrongness of the situation. You wouldn’t expect a country to be governed like this. And yet, incredibly, here we are.

Ms. Perry is a Free Expression columnist at WSJ Opinion.