Recently, though, the comedian has backed Mr Lowe’s fledgling Right-wing party amid concerns over the impact of immigration, cancel culture, free speech and Islam.
In an interview with The Telegraph in 2014, Cleese said the UK Independence Party was “enunciating something enormously important” in enshrining a sense of identity, but said he was unlikely to vote for them.
He said he was “all for immigration” but expressed concern about “people who come here who really don’t like our culture”.
In 2018, Mr Cleese said he was relocating to Nevis in the Caribbean and later claimed London was no longer an English city, prompting Sir Sadiq Khan to say the actor sounded “like he’s in character as Basil Fawlty”.
‘There won’t be a Britain left to restore’
Mr Cleese went on to dismiss the Mayor of London as a “silly little man”, adding: “Traditional British values are under attack from Muslim belief systems.”
Among dozens of social media posts in the past few days, Cleese has reshared several from Mr Lowe. In one, Mr Lowe pledged that Marlon West, Restore Britain’s candidate to replace Andy Burnham as mayor of Greater Manchester, would “go to war with the Pakistani Muslim rape gangs”.
In another, he said: “If the size of the Muslim population continues to grow at its current pace, there won’t be a Britain left to restore.”
In February, Cleese said it was “absolutely disgraceful” that the BBC had not given more attention to a crowdfunded investigation led by Mr Lowe into rape gangs.