Why is Big John on Newsnight?
In one of its more surreal episodes, the national broadcaster’s flagship current affairs programme recently invited the “social media content creator” (as the BBC called him) to weigh in on the Raise the Colours movement.
Big John described himself as a “proud Englishman,” said that he “can see why people are doing it,” and then pivoted — helped along by his interviewer — to condemning racist graffiti on the front of a Chinese restaurant in York. “I’m associated with Chinese restaurants,” he commented.
This, remarkably, wasn’t the end of Newsnight’s foray into Big John discourse. Days later they followed up with a deeper discussion of his apparent political significance.
At this point, it’s probably worth explaining to the uninitiated — which a few months ago would have included me — who Big John actually is.
John Fisher, or Big John, is a portly English bloke with 670,000 followers on Instagram whose general schtick involves generally positive messaging, drinking beer, eating, and saying “bosh”. But that obviously doesn’t explain Newsnight’s sudden interest in him.
The issue is that Big John is fishing in roughly the same pond as Tom Skinner, who has 712,000 Instagram followers and roughly eight times as many Twitter followers, does basically the same thing, and has the inbuilt advantage of having been on The Apprentice several years ago. He even says “bosh”.
Skinner, however, has recently upset left-wingers by tweeting vaguely right-wing things, becoming friends with conservative academic James Orr, and finally meeting JD Vance and being pictured wearing a MAGA hat.
Big John has done none of these things, which leads us to the presenter of the BBC’s flagship current affairs programme literally saying the words “Luke, we’ve got a tale of two boshes, what does it say?”
Luke Tryl, from pollsters More in Common, went on to describe a “battle of the boshes” where Tom Skinner represents the “dissenting disrupters” who think Britain needs more flags and a “Trumpite revolution;” whereas Big John represents the “rooted patriots” who are “just as patriotic” but “aren’t as political” and “are a bit more sceptical” of the flag-raising trend, and are “probably closer to the median voter”.
You can probably take a wild guess which archetype the Newsnight panel preferred.
But it doesn’t take some deep analysis to work out why Big John’s star has risen so dramatically in recent months, first as an influencer, and most recently as a political commentator. It’s mostly left-wingers finding their own “bosh” guy who doesn’t say things they disagree with.
There are plenty of left-wingers on Twitter who’ve compared Big John favourably to Tom Skinner. The BBC themselves recently described Skinner as a “divisive figure,” adding that he has “been criticised in recent months,” while the New Statesman is imploring Big John to “speak for England”.
Even MPs, devoid of any more pressing issues to concern themselves with, have waded into the battle of the boshes. The Director-General of the BBC, of all people, was forced into defending the decision to cast Skinner in this year’s series of Strictly Come Dancing before the Commons’ Culture, Media, and Sport Committee. None of our elected lawmakers went so far as to recommend Big John as an alternative contestant.
But why are the left so desperate to have their own “bosh” guy?
It’s worth stressing that they’re so desperate to have a left-wing “bosh” guy that they’ve co-opted someone who hasn’t even said anything that left-wing.
Despite the social and, now, mainstream media flurry around him, Big John isn’t much of a political, let alone partisan, commentator and it’s hard for anyone, left or right, to take much issue with what he said on Newsnight. For all the attempts to present them as rival figureheads in an ideological struggle for the soul of England, I doubt that Tom Skinner would disagree with Big John on the subject of whether it’s OK to daub “GO HOME” and “CAT N DOG” all over a Chinese restaurant.
This all boils down to the fact that neither Big John nor Tom Skinner fit the bill of the typical British left-winger. Both are white, middle-aged, self-described patriotic Englishmen who live with their families in Romford, a constituency where Reform and the Tories are currently projected to rack up 68 per cent of the vote between them. If you had to draw a caricature of someone least likely to vote for a left-wing party or support left-wing causes in Britain in 2025, you’d probably come up with some mishmash of the two.
This is the sort of thing that makes modern political movements insecure. They tend to be embarrassed by the fact that they’re overwhelmingly unpopular with some demographic groups. US Republicans worry, for example, about how 92 per cent of black women vote Democrat — does that, they wonder, reflect badly on them as Republicans?
So political movements often respond to this by seeking out and elevating people who agree with them from the groups with which they’re unpopular. That’s why there’s demand for a left-wing “bosh” guy, or at least one who isn’t publicly right-wing.
Other examples include the late Harry Leslie Smith, a rare white male nonagenarian Corbynite in the 2010s. Or the many conservative black women who’ve become celebrities in US Republican circles: Kim Klacik, Diamond & Silk, Candace Owens.
Owens is a case study in how this tendency can backfire. After years as, arguably, America’s most prominent black female conservative pundit, she now uses her platform to argue that Brigitte Macron is a man and that the world is controlled by a paedophile elite who adhere to a Jewish sect called “Frankism”.
With hindsight, Owens’ turn towards deranged conspiracy theories isn’t too much of a surprise. She was previously on record vociferously criticising Republicans, and at one point even launched a website dedicated to doxxing anyone who posted a “hate-fuelled” online comment.
Political movements are better off not trying to promote people on their side who are wholly unsuited to political punditry
But it’s not like there were that many other potential candidates around at the time – by definition, demand from insecure conservatives for black female conservative commentators, or from insecure left-wingers for left-wing “bosh” guys, tends to outstrip supply.
Political movements are better off not trying to promote people on their side who are wholly unsuited to political punditry, even if they come from demographic groups who mostly don’t support them. But the only way that’s likely to happen is for political movements on all sides to be more comfortable with the fact that they’re inevitably going to be more popular with some groups than others.
Big John is many things, but a political commentator he is not. There doesn’t have to be a left-wing “bosh” guy, and left-wingers — let alone the BBC — should stop trying to make him one.
