HI, boss. A column on that Ed Sheeran concert statement, as requested...
It has been claimed in recent weeks that Ed Sheeran doesn’t care. That his decision to drop his pal from his tour was driven by money and fear. But I know the guy and I know his heart breaks. His heart breaks over the pain, the suffering, the devastation, the pity and the death. But enough about Ed and his career.
Mischievous reports have suggested that Ed’s relationship with Robert ‘Handjob Bob’ Kraft is more important to him than his music, his art and his friendships. Yes, he played at his wedding to a woman 200 years younger than him. Yes, Handjob Bob tied the knot in an IDF uniform and the little figures on top of the cake were Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian. Yes, Bob’s in the Epstein Files and is closely connected to the Netanyahu regime, but what of it? Can’t an ordinary bloke from Galway, sorry, Halifax, have a perfectly normal friendship with a fabulously wealthy Zionist pal of Jeffrey Epstein without people thinking there’s something off about it?
During that 40-minute conversation with Handjob Bob that led to Macklemore’s sacking, Ed tried his best to protect his friend and his right to speak out. He questioned Bob long and hard about what it would all mean if one of the world’s richest men succeeded in dictating the concert content of one of the world’s biggest musicians.
• What will this mean for the merch?
• You do know I’m supposed to be Irish, right?
• Do you think they’ll fall for it?
Yes, Ed is hurt by what’s happened, but he’s a trooper and he has already begun work on his next album, which he has provisionally entitled ‘Anything You Say, Bob’ which contains guest appearances by Pink, Boy George, Bono, Bob Geldof, Keir Starmer and Joe Biden.
And I can exclusively reveal that a new line-up of support acts has been finalised which will carry the tour through to its scheduled finish at the end of November. I will bring you that exclusive as soon as Handjob Bob gets the vetting information back from Palantir.
Ed picks up the shovel in Philadelphia and just keeps on digging
EXTRAORDINARY how quickly our understanding of a story morphs until it is almost the opposite to what it started out as.
Ed Sheeran has become for a huge amount of pro-Palestinian people a living symbol of cowardice and vacuity in a world on fire, both literally and metaphorically. And he may well be that symbol – just not for the reasons that so many think.
Squinter couldn’t care less if Ed Sheeran speaks out on Gaza. He’d love it if he did; he’d love it if Sheeran was as Irish as he pretends to be and stood up for what’s right in a world gone wrong.
SPEAKING UP: Macklemore makes the pro-Palestine speech that spelt disaster for Ed Sheeran
But famous people keeping shtum in the face of injustice is not the exception, it’s the rule. We can count on the fingers of one hand the number of genuine global A-listers who have spoken out about Israel’s genocide in Gaza. You’ve got Mark Ruffalo, Roger Waters.. and then you’re starting to struggle. Billie Eilish, maybe. Angelina Jolie, Javier Bardem…
I don’t care about Ed Sheeran keeping quiet because I’ve never been tested in the way that he has been; or in the way that any of the above five have been. Faced with a choice of losing money and power, most people with a lot of money and power to lose keep quiet. Those who don’t keep quiet are few because true, raw courage is rare. Ask yourself: How much would you give up to stand up? The answer is we don’t know and can never know until we’re tested, and let’s face it, people like us are never going to be tested.
And anyway, it’s not keeping quiet that leads Squinter to abhor what Sheeran has done over the past number of days. It’s punishing another person – another person close to him for 13 years – for not being quiet that has done for him.
The Halifax-born singer-songwriter is worth, according to what your read and who you believe – between £300 million and half a billion. He’s always going to sleep on satin sheets regardless of the answer he gave to billionaire Zionist Robert Kraft when the handjob enthusiast called and asked him if he’d mind dumping his main support act on his biggest ever tour.
And now that we’ve got the nature of his sin clear, we move on to the guy’s basic cop-on. Is he stupid, or has he surrounded himself with stupid people?
Sheeran is a Millennial. His milquetoast music appeals hugely to Millennials, but not exclusively. Millennials, in the United States as elsewhere around the world, poll heavily against Israel. Sheeran clearly knows his audience well because he keeps churning out music that keeps them reaching for their debit cards. He knows that when a 35-year-old stands up for a progressive cause he's going to lose very little of his audience, and what space is left by those he does lose will be filled by the newly-impressed. His overwhelmingly young and youngish audience will cheer him to the rafters, his older fans will tut-tut and keep loving his music; the way they did that time when he revealed he was a Corbynite.
So why did he choose the option that was clearly going to lose him more fans, cred, ticket sales and record sales?
Squinter doesn’t know any more than anybody else does. The idea that Kraft or other Israel-adjacent entertainment figures have the goods on him doesn’t float for the very simple reason that he was close friends for so long with Macklemore, an active and vocal anti-genocide figure, and he picked him as support on his tour. But we are very quick to forget those few short days between Macklemore opening his mouth and Kraft picking up the phone. Those were days in which the media, mainstream and social, was full of passionate denunciations of the rapper, with Fox Nooz and the Daily Mail leading the charge. And there was little or no counter-argument because we’d seen and heard it all so many times before.
Maybe Sheeran simply forgot those other voices, those majority voices, when the field was open to the usual gammons suspects. If so, he’s clearly comfortable about going back to forgetting as he tries to resurrect his career.
