Ed Sheeran made an art of being inoffensive: Here’s why it didn’t work

In Aesop’s fable of the donkey, a man is criticised for riding his donkey to market while his son walks. When he lets his son ride, he’s criticised for spoiling the boy. He joins the boy on the donkey and is criticised for hurting the animal. Finally, he and the boy carry the donkey, but drop it into a river. Moral: try to please everybody and you’ll please nobody, plus you drown your donkey.

In the 2026 version, Ed Sheeran is the man with the donkey. Sheeran, a 35-year-old English married father of two, has made a successful art of inoffensiveness, selling 200 million records from pleasant tunes and lyrics that never offended anyone. His personality is authentically inoffensive. His wife, his childhood sweetheart, had cancer. He supports charities that also offend no one. Until this month, the worst he was accused of was plagiarising melodies, but in the gloriously lucrative middle that Sheeran occupies, everything sounds a bit like something else.

So how is it that Ed Sheeran has ended up offending everyone?

This fable started when Sheeran, for his sold-out tour Loop, invited the American rapper Macklemore to be his support act. Macklemore is a figurehead of celebrity-activism. As the warm-up act for the 2017 NRL grand final in Sydney, back when we had such things, Macklemore performed his anthem Same Love as we approached the same-sex marriage plebiscite. Since the onset of the war in Gaza, Macklemore has campaigned for the Palestinian people and his song Hind’s Hall is named for a six-year-old Palestinian victim.

Sheeran, who has proudly made mega-bland into a mega-brand, might have been using Macklemore as a proxy, to give his shows a bit of edge while remaining personally apolitical. Sheeran’s most radical stance on anything had been to echo others’ opposition to Brexit. His commercial locomotive is peace and love and no disagreement. You really could please everyone all the time, or so the business model went.

Then came private property, in the person of Robert Kraft, owner of the Boston stadium where Sheeran and Macklemore were booked. Kraft is a prominent supporter of the Israeli government and staunch opponent of antisemitism. Benjamin Netanyahu has described Kraft as Israel’s most loyal friend. Kraft told Sheeran the concert could not proceed unless Macklemore was removed. Other stadium owners reportedly threatened the same. Macklemore was punted. Sheeran’s other support acts and backing band pulled out of the tour in solidarity. Sheeran, desperate to continue taking no position, said the decision was not his but the tour promoter’s.

Sheeran has continued the tour solo, making passive-voice apologies and condemning all violence. On Instagram he posted, “There are too many wars across the world causing immeasurable pain, none of which should be tolerated.” The Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 were “horrific”, he said on stage, and the Israeli Defence Forces’ response was “catastrophic”.

By now, he was carrying the donkey onto the bridge. The pile-on intensified. “Even Ed Sheeran’s apology took both sides,” said The New Yorker’s headline. The internet joke went, “How do I boycott Ed Sheeran’s music when my previous consumption of his work was zero?” Criticised by both pro-Palestine and pro-Israel voices, Sheeran found new friends in the anti-woke far right. A fan, Eva Stevens, said “the middle” was now the most dangerous place to be.

Sheeran was just bending over backwards to avoid making enemies, wasn’t he? He sang at Kraft’s wedding. Kraft is his friend. Sheeran had to consider the infrastructure of workers, from stage riggers to popcorn sellers, whose pay packets depended on him. His wish was to be as utilitarian as his songs: maximum benefit to the maximum number.

But you can’t draw a straight line in curved space, even if you’re Ed Sheeran. The mental and moral gymnastics of inoffensiveness and de-escalating conflict through general agreeableness may be a mask for cowardice, but it can also be the kind of complicity that gives a free pass for power to do what it wants.

We equate celebrity with power and influence, but the Sheeran fable shows the illusion of this “power” when it butts up against the raw reality of real estate. Kraft, like theatre owners stopping certain plays and like tech bros dictating the content of their social media platforms, is asserting his private property rights. My house, my rules.

When we talk about free speech, what we’re often really talking about is control of the spaces in which speech happens. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez commented, this story is not about the content of Macklemore’s speech or Sheeran’s agonised wriggling, but the power of “a handful of stadium owners”.

In Australia, most of our stadiums, libraries, universities, town halls and gathering places are not owned by private individuals who can set the house rules. Yet the public trustees of those places increasingly act as if they are owners. The South Australian and Queensland governments and the State Library of Victoria have, in silencing controversial speech, assumed the prerogatives and privileges of private ownership, slipping into the same dark hole as Donald Trump who, in kicking disobedient media out of the White House, said it was “my house” (before quickly correcting himself and calling it “the people’s house”; but for the great privatiser, there’s no difference).

It’s not too much to expect our libraries, universities and the rest to remember that they are stewards of a public trust, not owners of a private house. At the last writers’ festivals in Newcastle and Sydney, the NSW government opposed the appearance of some writers but stopped short of pulling funding. The stopping-short is the critical point. Governments might provide some of the means for public events, but this is not a purchase of the words that are spoken in them, as long as they fall within the law.

That’s the difference between public and private rights, between democracy and oligarchy. Responsible public stewardship of public spaces is one of the differences between us and America, and one we must be very careful to preserve.

Maybe Macklemore would be welcome on public Australian land. Tones and I, the Australian artist who almost performed at this year’s NRL grand final, has a clashing engagement that day with … Macklemore. There’s a slot going begging at the Olympic Stadium at 7pm on October 4. But yeah, nah, who needs more controversy when you’ve already got the NRL bunker trying to please all the people, all the time.