I love the Caribbean too, but dreary John Cleese is a fool to choose a tax haven over a vibrant city like London

It might be easy to dismiss John Cleese’s tirade about London not being “an English city” as the musings of a grumpy old man, but in my mind that would be a mistake. With 5.69 million followers on Twitter, the former Monty Python star knows these controversial remarks will attract worldwide attention.

Moaning about the decline of English culture is a repetition of stuff he’s ranted about before. In protest, Cleese has moved to the tiny two-mile-wide and about six-mile-long Caribbean island of Nevis, that has a population of just 11,000 inhabitants, claiming that the weather is wonderful, the population is “very well educated,” there’s no knife crime and “no sign of Rupert Murdoch”.

Another reason Cleese is angry about London’s alleged decline is because of “Russian dirty-money laundering”, which is ironic when Nevis itself has plenty to answer on that score. Between 2013 and 2017 there were no convictions for money laundering or tax evasion on Nevis, and in 2017 the US State Department named the island a “jurisdiction of concern” in a report on money laundering and financial crimes. Financial experts regularly rate Nevis one of the world’s top 10 offshore tax havens because of the island’s strong secrecy laws. In 2000, Nevis was placed on a blacklist of 35 countries named by the OECD for being “non-cooperative” in regard to money laundering and tax evasion.

Having been born, educated and spent all my working life in London, I love it from the bottom of my heart: it is part of my DNA. Does Cleese mean he can’t cope with walking down a London street seeing lots of different faces? Or does he find it difficult to encounter modestly dressed women wearing veils? He prefers (ironically) to live on a tiny island where historically a small group of rich white people ran the slave trade and owned all the plantations, where black and Irish people worked for a pittance in dreadful conditions for centuries. I’ve visited Nevis many times, but claiming it has more to offer than the most inspiring multicultural city in the world is like opting to live on a diet of black pudding and kippers for the rest of your life.

Nevis is charming but its delights are limited. Swearing is illegal and the locals, unfailingly courteous and polite. The island relies on tourism and financial services for income, with former plantation houses – including Montpelier, where Nelson married Fanny Nisbet – turned into expensive luxury hotels. Princess Diana visited and took the young princes Harry and William to a beach barbecue there. Cleese sounds like someone from half a century ago – the Terry Thomas character in the Boulting brothers’ 1959 comedy Carlton-Browne of the FO, in which a hapless diplomat is sent to a tiny tropical island to sort out a dispute.

On my last trip to Nevis it rained a lot, but maybe the weather avoids Cleese’s hideaway? I tried to climb the extinct volcano but the track was completely overgrown and dangerous, involved slithering up through thick mud, clinging to fraying ropes and clambering over giant boulders and fallen tree trunks. A less challenging drive takes you around the island – a small circuit that can get repetitious – a bit like Cleese. In a week, you have seen every beach, visited every bar and shop. A large number of the people you encounter will be white tourists in sun hats, being driven around by local taxi drivers.

Cleese tweeted that he took a Californian friend down the King’s Road and was asked “where are all the English people?” Which begs the question: does English have to mean white? Meanwhile, Basil Fawlty has become a tourist himself, choosing to live in a place where foreign companies pay little tax and claiming, “as I turn 80 I’m allowed a couple of years off”. As for being white, London is a city which has received (although, shamefully, not always welcomed) waves of immigrants over the centuries – starting with the Romans, then the Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Bengali and those from the Caribbean who arrived on the Windrush in 1948.

I can remember how exciting the streets around Notting Hill were during the 1960s, the bars and clubs that played reggae and blues music and the dives where you could buy a spliff from a respectable-looking middle-aged lady sitting with a big handbag. Jamaicans wore fantastic clothes and their arrival might have been greeted with racism in some quarters of the city, but in my teenage world of music and clubbing the new arrivals were welcomed. I’d grown up attending a Church of England school in Fulham, where Catholics had their own schools – we forget how religion divided working class communities in inner London right up to the 1950s, each with their own youth clubs and social networks.

Modern London might be dirty and crowded with appalling traffic, but its inhabitants produce the best entertainment, food and a rich cultural life – that’s why we’ve attracted so many tourists. Cleese seems to be pining for a pasty 1950s Terry-Thomas Britain, but he should start sitting in the front of Ubers and listening to the drivers’ stories from Latvia, Ukraine, Bangladesh and Turkey. Or shopping in my local corner store and talking to the customers and travelling on the Overground and listening to the fellow passengers.

London is life-enhancing, but Cleese has opted to spend his final years ignoring what is enriching and opting instead for the predictable.