Tuesday 16 October 2018 4:34 pm | Updated: Tuesday 21 May 2019 4:22 pm

Celebrities like Kanye West and Taylor Swift need to learn that we really don’t care what they think

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Taylor Swift, look what you made me do. Swifty has been a hallowed island of political neutrality in a sea of bad blood. But she’s now come out as a mid-term Democrat, and the love story is over.

Maybe one day historians will look back and admire how Bob Geldof’s support for a People’s Vote changed the course of British history, how JK Rowling’s Harry Potter-themed allegory on the Israel-Palestine situation lit a fire under the backsides of world leaders, and how Benedict Cumberbatch’s post-Hamlet speech on refugees that urged his adoring crowd to “f*** the politicians” established him as the foremost political orator of our age. Then again, they may not.

The court of social media demands that we know what everybody thinks about everything all of the time, however bland. Celebrities might be worshipped as deities, but that doesn’t give their half-baked hot takes intrinsic value.

Please, do yourselves and the rest of us a favour, and shelve the political discourse. Twitter point-scoring does not elevate your brand, Instagram users are not a barometer for morality, and 500,000 retweets does not mean that you are speaking with nuance.

Part of the pleasure of film, theatre and music is the opportunity to escape, to remove oneself from the grind of the everyday. When a star’s every opinion is plastered over the press, we are deprived of that escapism. What’s so wrong with focusing on entertaining?

The less we know about you, the more we will probably like you.

Kanye West: case in point. “Ye” drew ire after wearing a Make America Great Again hat on Saturday Night Live (SNL), and rambling on about who-even-knows-what. Last week, he visited the Oval Office to show his support for the President and made another bizarre speech, calling his own hat his “Superman cape”.

Instead of associating Kanye with albums like “Graduation” and “College Dropout”, I’m now subconsciously haunted by his belief that the Democrats have perfected the art of Sith mind control. “Follow your heart” is not profundity, Kanye.

Worryingly, this issue isn’t contained to the political left or right, though I would actually hesitate to place Kanye in either camp (he occupies his own unique place on the political spectrum). Still, the aftermath of his SNL appearance got even better. Captain America’s Chris Evans, who runs very close to the BBC’s Chris Evans in the Irritant Olympics, responded by tweeting:

“There’s nothing more maddening than debating someone who doesn’t know history, doesn’t read books, and frames their myopia as virtue. The level of unapologetic conjecture I’ve encountered lately isn’t just frustrating, it’s retrogressive, unprecedented and absolutely terrifying.”

I’ve always thought that Russell Brand’s interviews give the impression of a man who once swallowed a thesaurus, and now involuntarily vomits the words back out in no particular order. I don’t know what Chris Evans has swallowed, maybe a Russell Brand?

My kingdom for a few more people like Daniel Day-Lewis. An actor known only for acting, and much easier to enjoy on screen as a consequence.

Damon Albarn has not enhanced my enjoyment of Gorillaz by blabbering in tongues about Brexit. Do we really want a debate on whether “slavery was a choice” to originate from Kanye, the same man who wrote “Drunk and Hot Girls”?

Taylor Swift, your dignified silence was magnificent, but now we are never, ever getting back together.

And finally, JK Rowling. Hogwarts is not real. I like that it’s not real. I don’t want everything in it to be a social metaphor.

This is showbiz. But I promise, less is more.