The Death of Cleverness

Before I’d even watched an episode of The Traitors, I admitted to someone that I didn’t much like Stephen Fry. Not passionately, just instinctively, the kind of comment that comes from somewhere real but vague, a sense built slowly over time rather than sparked by any one thing. I couldn’t explain it exactly, but maybe I was rejecting what Fry represented, that particular British brand of cleverness defined less by thought than by tone. The man who remembered things and spoke beautifully about them. The man who, for years, was treated as proof that knowing a lot and sounding posh makes a genius.

Watching him stumble through The Celebrity Traitors, then, felt like confirmation bias in real time.  Here was the nation’s resident genius, suddenly adrift in a game that rewards instinct over intellect, empathy over encyclopaedia. TikTok pounced, with endless clips diagnosing his downfall, captions declaring him “not that clever after all.” But the interesting question isn’t whether Stephen Fry is clever. It’s why we ever thought he was.

Fry’s whole career is a monument to the performance of intelligence, built on that particular British archetype; the affable intellectual who makes knowledge seem entertaining. The deep, rolling vowels, the literary name-drops, the genial mastery of trivia. He was Cambridge-made, not Cambridge-bound, the kind of man who could admit to having been expelled, arrested for credit-card fraud, skipping his exams, and still be seen as brilliant. Britain loves that story, the charming rule-breaker whose mind is simply too big for classrooms. If he’d been working-class, the same behaviour would have been called delinquency. But Fry’s cleverness, like so many people’s, was partly accent and access.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t intelligent. He is, perhaps prodigiously so. But the version of intellect he represents belongs to a time when knowing things was impressive in itself. When knowledge was scarce, and recall was a kind of magic trick. QI made that magic glamorous, with Fry presiding like a benevolent headmaster, dispensing facts and Wildean wit. The show was, of course, written and researched by a team of QI elves. Fry’s gift wasn’t omniscience, but articulation; he could turn other people’s information into theatre.

There’s no shame in that. It’s a skill, and a rare one. But it highlights how much of British cleverness has always been performed. They make intelligence sound beautiful. And in a culture obsessed with class, that beauty has often been measured by diction. An Etonian intonation, the Oxbridge pause. It signals authority even when the content doesn’t.

Maybe that’s why The Traitors felt so unforgiving. It doesn’t reward performance. There’s no script, no edit, no space for Oxbridge flourishes. The game demands an entirely different intelligence; emotional calibration, reading people, bending truth just enough to survive. Perhaps the dissonance between Fry’s reputation and his performance says less about him and more about the type of intellect we used to worship. Cleverness that dazzled but didn’t connect.

And yet, maybe we’re being unfair. What if Fry’s kind of cleverness was never meant for this kind of world? He came of age in an era when knowledge itself was scarce, when having the answers was enough. Now, everyone has the answers, or at least access to them. The internet has levelled that hierarchy. Intelligence isn’t what you know anymore, it’s what you do with what you know. It’s how you apply, empathise, and translate. The clever person now isn’t the one who recalls the trivia, it’s the one who makes sense of the noise.

Maybe that’s why Fry suddenly feels out of sync. He’s a man built for the age of scarcity, performing cleverness in an era of surplus. It’s not that he’s become less intelligent, it’s that the rest of us no longer mistake eloquence for insight. The internet is merciless that way, it flattens hierarchies of knowledge and exposes pretension. But it also risks replacing one performance with another. If Fry’s brand of cleverness was about polish and poise, ours is about immediacy and relatability. Maybe neither is more genuine, they’re just different ways of signalling belonging.

So when people online delight in his downfall, what are they really mocking? The man, or the system that built him? The institution that equated intellect with accent and forgave privilege as charm, that romanticised the gifted rule-breaker while scorning the striver, and left no room for other forms of brilliance? Maybe Fry’s downfall on The Traitors isn’t a humiliation but a parable. A reminder that cleverness has never been about who speaks best, but who listens.

Perhaps that’s the lesson here; not that Stephen Fry isn’t clever, but that cleverness itself has changed shape, leaving him stranded between two ages; caught between a world that once admired his kind of brilliance, and one that’s no longer impressed by it.