Viewers hit back at Emma Thompson’s claim her friends had to sell their homes due to mini-Budget

Social media users have hit back at Dame Emma Thompson’s claim that her friends ‘had to sell their houses’ following the turmoil sparked by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-Budget last September.

Viewers took to Twitter to criticise the Hollywood actress, with one asking: ‘Which one? The skiing chalet or a holiday home in Barbados?’

Another said: ‘Is this the same ladie who flew on a private jet to London from LA to lecture everyone on climate change?’

It comes after Ms Thompson, whose net worth is said to be at around £40million, told LBC’s Andrew Marr she was aghast at ‘the fact that I had friends that literally had to sell their houses because they couldn’t afford their mortgages anymore’. 

The 63-year-old said: ‘I couldn’t believe it as it was unrolling.

‘Seriously, it was an extraordinary experience to look at that. But what was so dreadful is, I worry so much about the country at the moment, about people’s situations and the money thing.’   

‘People in the middle, middle-resourced folk were suffering dreadfully. It was mind-boggling,’ the Oscar-winner added.

Ms Thompson herself owns a £3million house in London, a Scottish holiday home and another property in Venice, Italy.

This is not the first time Ms Thompson’s political comments have raised an eyebrow. The actress came out firmly as a Remainer back in 2016, telling a reporter at the Berlin International Film Festival that Britain is ‘a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled, misery-laden, grey old island.

‘I feel European even though I live in Great Britain, and in Scotland.

‘So of course I’m going to vote to stay in Europe. Oh my God, it would be madness not to.

‘It would be a crazy idea not to. We should be taking down borders, not putting them up.’

More recently she faced backlash after flying 5,400 miles from California to London in order to take part in an Extinction Rebellion climate change protest in 2019.

The Love Actually star later admitted that the move was hypocritical but was ‘not the story’.

Speaking to ITV News later in the year she said: ‘What does it matter that I get pilloried. If you put your head up, that’s what’s going to happen. But I think what really does matter is to point out that that’s not the story.

‘I was really shocked by that actually, because all these people know I have to fly when I work. I live here, I’ve always lived here and sometimes I have to fly. I fly so much less than I did but I do have to fly sometimes.’

Ms Thompson has also dabbled in international geopolitics.

Speaking in 2007, the Howard’s End star decried the ‘devastating effects on Palestinians’ health and livelihoods of Israel’s separation wall’ and called on British politicians to do more to solve the situation.

Thompson has also come out against sloppy language, which she says drives her ‘insane’.

Back in 2010 she railed against those who did not speak properly to Radio Times, saying: ‘We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power.’

Her strong feelings on the matter came after she delivered a talk at her old school, and she heard pupils using slang words.

‘I told them: “Just don’t do it. Because it makes you sound stupid and you’re not stupid.”

‘There is the necessity to have two languages – one that you use with your mates and the other that you need in any official capacity.’