For the love of Paddington

The problem with worshiping DEI

We need to talk about Paddington. Britain’s obsession with the Peruvian bear has long been unhealthy. But for a fictional character from a children’s story to be transformed into the moral voice of the nation is truly deranged. 

Yet this week brings yet another reminder of the God-like status now afforded to Michael Bond’s creation. Earlier this month, at the end of a drunken night out, two RAF engineers stole a statue of the bear which was attached to a bench in the author’s home town of Newbury. CCTV captured Daniel Heath and William Lawrence removing the statue and transporting it, via a taxi, to their nearby RAF base. 

This was a stupid thing to do and the pair are, rightly, said to be, ‘extremely ashamed about their decisions’. Appearing in court this week, they admitted criminal damage and were fined and sentenced to 150 hours community service. In a sane country, that would be the end of it. But this was Paddington, ‘a beloved cultural icon’ as District Judge Sam Goozee informed the court in his summing up. And we are not a sane country. 

‘His famous label attached to his duffle coat says: ‘Please look after this bear,’’ Goozee stated, appearing to have lost all capacity to distinguish fact from fiction, the twee from the serious and the realm of childhood from the adult world. But this was all just preamble to his killer line: ‘Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.’ 

Sorry, what? To state the bleeding obvious: Paddington is not real. All he ‘stands for’ is the genius of Michael Bond’s imagination. Yet, as the judge’s disappointed scolding makes clear, this character from a 1960s kids’ book has somehow been beatified. ‘He represents kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society,’ said Goozee, pointing to the bear’s D.E.I-ification. It seems that in attacking Paddington, Heath and Lawrence’s real crime was not vandalism but blasphemy against the God of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 

‘You were both under the influence of alcohol. Paddington Bear was then located in William Lawrence’s vehicle,’ concluded the judge. How could any grown-up possibly deliver such a line with a straight face? If judges, people with qualifications and expertise no less, confuse fantasy and reality in this way then Britain’s problems truly run deep. But Paddington’s rise to becoming the nation’s moral conscience has been long in the making, so perhaps it’s unfair to single out Gooze. 

As he reminded the court, there are 23 Paddington statues located across the UK and Ireland. That we even know this is bonkers. There seems to be no such official count of statues of Churchill or Shakespeare and they actually lived. Perhaps this is Paddington’s attraction. Real people exist within a particular time period and tend to reflect that era’s values. Real people often have messy personal lives; few of us are unambiguously good or bad. But moral purity and any manner of values can be ascribed to fictional bears. They never disappoint.

Paddington’s elevation to national treasure occurred as the stories moved from paperback to screen and from the beautiful line-drawn animations of the 1970s to twenty-first century CGI. His fumbling politeness, home in London and fondness for marmalade and duffle coats portrayed a national identity that lay halfway between Cool Britannia and Great British Bake Off. The bear’s place in the nation’s affections was sealed when he was given a starring role in the then-Queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations. 

But Paddington is more than simply iconic. It’s his status as a refugee from ‘Darkest Peru’ who is dependent upon the kindness of strangers that has transformed him into a paragon of virtue. Paddington-as-migrant was little remarked upon in the 1960s and 70s, the heyday of Michael Bond’s children’s books, just as the descriptor ‘Darkest’ has now been quietly dropped from the bear’s fictional homeland. So it was that Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan dragged Paddington into 2025’s New Year’s Eve firework display and thus was born the bear as an innocent migrant, symbol of diversity, kindness, tolerance and inclusion. 

Paddington is, we are told, representative of Britishness and this means marmalade, cocoa, royalty, diversity and welcoming migrants. But this is a gross sleight of hand. Unable to name real historical heroes and unwilling to make the case for either British values or mass migration, our pathetic cultural elite choose instead to hide behind a fictional bear. They hope to disguise the moral vacuum and democratic deficit at the heart of British society with the beatification of a storybook character. 

The case of the stolen statue shows us that Britain’s ruling class have lost the plot. When it comes to Paddington, they don’t see a cute children’s teddy bear but a religious relic that must be protected at all costs. For this reason, Daniel Heath and William Lawrence are not considered to be guilty of a straightforward act of vandalism but of crucifying a woke messiah. It's not drunken idiots we need to worry about but the insanity of our judiciary.

An edited version of this article was published at Spiked: https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/26/paddington-patron-saint-of-the-liberal-elites/