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

September 25, 2026 — 3:30pm

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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,........

© Brisbane Times