March of the Lemmings

by Stewart Lee

  Contents

  Title Page

  Preface

  PART I: BREXIT IN PRINT 2016–2019

  Introduction

  The EU debate is a cynical battle of big beasts, not belief

  I’m not saying Michael Gove is a bit of an animal but …

  Where was Putin when Corbyn needed him?

  No more schmoozing with the enemy on TV shows

  My Paul Nuttalls routine has floated back up the U-bend

  Beyond good and evil with Gove and Trump

  Roll over, Grandma, and tell Robert Peston the news

  Even stand-up has been weaponised by fake news

  How a sex robot ended up on the One Show sofa

  When Boris Johnson’s inner monster goes on the rampage

  A papal encounter with a bat-faced duck-lion

  It will take more than ceramics and cheese to unite our divided country

  Chronicle of May’s fiasco foretold in a urine stain

  ‘Oh, Jeremy Clarkson.’ Is that any better as a Glastonbury chant?

  When in Europe, dress like a walking apology for Brexit

  Political turmoil has left humourists with nothing to aim at

  Kim Jong-un’s happiness is just a weekend mini-break away

  My futile attempt to sell satire to the Daily Mail

  Can Harry and Meghan make Britain whole again?

  How Toby Young got where he isn’t today

  My desperate bid to match Boris Johnson’s colossal lies

  Satire only makes Jacob Rees-Mogg stronger

  Is a sci-fi-style dystopia such a bad outcome for Brexit?

  The Brexit culture wars are driving me bananas

  American Cornish pasties? Did King Arthur die for this?

  Stay focused, Brexiteers. Russia is not the enemy

  The racists won. So are they happy now?

  Full plans for the porn president’s visit to the UK revealed

  So that’s Trump’s game! The Second Coming

  How to treat Morrissey? Stop listening to him

  Trump’s struggle not to tie himself in nots

  Bannon’s crush on Britain’s old bootboys

  A floppy-haired beast of Brexit walks among us

  Denmark sows the seeds of discontent over Brexit

  Take back control! Buy water!! Bin the Daily Telegraph!!!

  Don’t drag Abba into Theresa May’s Dead-Cat Dance

  Is it ethical to raise a royal baby in captivity?

  A no-column Brexit is the only way forward

  Why Jacob Rees-Mogg is still voting with his feet

  Prepare yourselves for a no-Christmas Brexit in 2019

  With Brexit gifts, it’s the thought that counts

  Why did the BBC let Andrew Neil combust?

  Possessed by Brexit? Time to call an exorcist

  PART II: BREXIT IN PERFORMANCE 2016–2018

  Introduction

  Brexit confusion is scuppering my show

  Content Provider: Stewart Lee Live

  PART III: WHAT NOW?

  Epilogue

  With the end in sight, Brexit pulls into a layby

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  Preface

  ‘May you live in interesting times.’

  ANCIENT CHINESE CURSE, 2000 BC

  ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’

  SARAH VINE ON THE EU REFERENDUM, 24 JUNE 2016

  ‘Twat!’

  DANNY DYER ON DAVID CAMERON, 27 JUNE 2018

  My first book of collected columns, Content Provider, written in the five years between April 2011 and April 2016, compiled supposedly humorous prose and charted my attempts to discover a ‘columnist voice’. This period seems so long ago now, a time before Brexit and Trump, and the daily concerns of the era suddenly appear to be largely trivial, the luxurious petty anxieties of the concerned citizen of a relatively stable liberal democracy, and one who had access to as much insulin as he could drink.

  Conveniently, from April 2016 onwards, I found the focus of my semi-regular newspaper columns became almost monomaniacally fixated upon Brexit; and my stand-up comedy live work – principally the 2016–18 touring show, also called Content Provider – couldn’t escape the referendum’s toilet-flush pull either, however far I stuffed my hand down the news bowl.

  Whatever our position on the referendum, I am sure we have all lost friends over Brexit. I hope so anyway. Today, I see these losses not as some terrible tragedy, but as a necessary cull, a chopping away of dead wood, a winnowing of chaff. In the three years since the EU referendum, I find myself increasingly furious, cynical and depressed. I am politically homeless. I wish I spoke another language or had some transferable skills – tanning hide perhaps, or contemporary dance – so I could gather up my family and start again, somewhere far away.

  I don’t recognise my country or many of the people I thought I knew. And I am not sure I recognise myself any more, and the angry, disillusioned person I have become in reality, rather than just on stage. I also seem to have put on a lot of weight, developed high blood pressure and erectile dysfunction, become partially blind and gone completely grey, all of which I also blame on Brexit in general, and Jacob Rees-Mogg specifically.

  I aimed to hand the edited and completed manuscript of this book in to my high-class literary publishers, Faber & Fucking Faber, of Bloomsbury, on the day we were due to leave the EU, Friday 29 March 2019. And I aimed to do this irrespective of whether that bold leap into the void had finally been made, deal or no deal, Brexit or no Brexit. I didn’t want there to be time to further reassess the book’s contents in the light of whatever happened next. And that is what I have done.

  It is for others who come after me – perhaps alien historians alighting on our burned and lifeless planet millions of years in the future – to decide if the work collected herein represents a valuable and enlightening study of this tumultuous time in the rich pageant of our island nation’s spangled history, or if it is just a load of old stuff all mashed up. And maybe this book will become the basis of an alien religion, a death cult no less. And I will be its prophet, the Lawgiver.

  With a view towards shaping the inevitable book-length collection into a coherent whole, I tried, throughout the last three years of writing the columns, to concentrate on certain themes and recurring characters. And in assembling this collection I have tried, dishonestly, but to the best of my ability, to remove any columns that didn’t shadow the story of Brexit. In Part II of the book, which deals with the live work I generated since the referendum, footnotes indicate how it was both sabotaged and shaped by the wet hand of Brexit. Rarely has a minor celebrity’s cash-in book creaked so loudly under such a lofty weight of intent.

  Now, together, let us start to heal this divided land.

  Stewart Lee, writer/clown

  Stoke Newington, March 2019

  PART I:

  BREXIT IN PRINT

  2016–2019

  Introduction

  I always maintain that I take on a persona when writing columns for the Observer: that of an adopted man, from a relatively normal social background, who is an obvious victim of imposter syndrome. I don’t so much write the columns as transcribe them. The adopted man stands at my shoulder, just out of sight, biting his nails and chewing the inside of his face, mumbling things into my ear, some of which I mishear. He simply can’t believe he is being employed by a posh left-leaning newspaper that his own parents wouldn’t have read, and knows there has been some mistake.1 Thus, he tries to compensate by employing over-finessed language and attempting to give a good account of himself, politically and intellectually, aware that he is being scrutinised by his bet
ters.

  Obviously, as this persona is the same as me, it is not a massive stretch to channel it, although I am surprised this other me hasn’t been sacked. What is true of both the columnist and the stand-up characters of me is that over the period of producing work in the interregnum between the EU referendum, in June 2016, and the supposed activation of Article 50, in March 2019, both became increasingly angry, bitter and incoherent.

  Similarly, the comments on the newspaper columns included here, from members of the public who uploaded their views to social media or the paper’s website,2 while often astute in identifying weaknesses in the work, also become more frenzied as the months pass, as if we are witnessing a collective national unravelling of sense. Many of them, it is increasingly clear, are also the work of anonymous agents, perhaps hired for the purpose, intent on advancing very specific disruptive processes on behalf of unnamed paymasters.

  The only voice you can trust in this entire book is the one the footnotes are written in, which seems to be pursuing its own agenda: an autobiographical unburdening intent on setting various stories straight, as if the author, now suddenly finding himself in his fifties and watching the world he knows fall apart and decay as he himself in turn falls apart and decays, can sense death on the horizon and wants to leave his personal effects in order, to minimise the inconvenience caused to his family.

  And this? This is this.

  1 I was initially brought in to the Observer’s Sunday funnies slot to fill in for David Mitchell’s absences, not, as online commenters suggest, as a replacement for Frankie Boyle and his writing team, who produced weekly columns for the Sun until September 2013, and occasional ones for the Guardian since. With so many comedians producing newspaper column content, their minor-celebrity status driving traffic through a dead medium, it does get confusing. Mark Steel in the Independent is the best of the comedian columnists, and Marina Hyde is the best of the legitimate journalist-humourists. Even though I have gradually been promoted to a fifty–fifty share of the Observer column, like a divorced dad given greater access to the kids having conquered his drinking, in my mind I will always think of it as David Mitchell’s column and of myself as a kind of cat that does a smell in David Mitchell’s lovely garden and then goes back over the fence where it belongs. I couldn’t cope with the responsibility of being a newspaper columnist otherwise. My whole professional life, it seems to me as I enter my sixth decade on this planet, has been an act of cowardly retreat from commitments and opportunities, deludedly disguised as legitimate moral objections, which accidentally coalesced into a successful career. I find myself with a beautiful spouse, with a beautiful life, and I ask myself, ‘How did I get here?’ And I say to myself, ‘Great Scott! What have I done?’

  2 Unless otherwise attributed, all the readers’ comments are from the online editions of the publication the pieces appeared in.

  The EU debate is a cynical battle of big beasts, not belief

  1 May 2016

  Last weekend I found myself trapped on an isolated, monster-infested Pacific atoll with a pair of twin psychic Japanese school-girls. A skyscraper-sized lizard, with three fire-breathing heads, the result of careless radioactive experiments in the ’50s, and now a huge and clumsy metaphor for both the dangers of human scientific meddling with Mother Nature and post-war Japanese identity anxiety, had cornered us in a cave on the beach.1

  My new friends Lora and Moll hoped to summon to our aid a gigantic moth, with roughly the dimensions of an airship, over which they exercised a strange interspecies erotic sway. Anticipating this titanic struggle of equally matched opponents, each driven by blind instinct and insensible to reason, my thoughts naturally turned to June’s forthcoming Brexit vote.

  Arguments about Brexit are tearing my family apart. In March, drunk in the late dark, and loose on the Internet, I had ordered a European flag from Amazon, intending to fly it from the roof come the week of the Eurovote, so as to annoy any divs living locally.

  But I forgot about the flag and left it on the sofa, and now the cat has taken to sleeping under it.2 Which is odd, as previously he was an avowed Eurosceptic, and would hiss aggressively whenever I put any European free jazz on the stereo. Indeed, we have on occasion used Günter ‘Baby’ Sommer’s Hörmusik solo percussion album to drive him from the room when he made a smell.3

  In a heated late-night argument with my pro-Brexit stepbrother two weeks ago, I used the contented cat’s obvious happiness underneath the European flag to show him how Europe could shelter and comfort us, like cats under a flag. My stepbrother, brilliantly, snatched the European flag off the cat’s back to show how the creature, and by association the nation, was quite capable of functioning without the embrace of Europe. I think this is an example of the kind of easy-to-understand argument the British public claim has been denied them in favour of tedious figures and facts about trade, environmental legislation, human rights and immigration.

  The cat looked annoyed and eyed both of us with resentment. Already, the Brexit debate is tearing families apart, stepbrother against stepbrother, stepbrother against stepbrother-in-law, stepbrother-in-law against stepcat. ‘Shouldn’t you be in Japan by now, anyway?’ he said, throwing my flag on the fire.

  A few days later I arrived in the so-called Land of the Rising Sun for a meeting with the famous Studio Haino, who had begun work on an anime version of my multiple BAFTA- and British Comedy Award-winning BBC2 series, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, which they believed would play well with young Asian hipsters, jaded geisha and disillusioned samurai.4

  Because Fuck! Stewart Lee Pee-Pee Charabanc (the literal Japanese translation of Studio Haino’s new title for the show) was already expected to be a big hit, various merchandise spin-offs were almost up and running. A string of love beads, each sporting a different picture of my face, is already available in Japanese adult stores.

  And since January I have been wearing four or five new pairs of pants a day, all of which will eventually take pride of place, when suitably soiled, in vending machines on the streets of Tokyo’s most fashionable districts.

  My wife, of course, finds this turn of events ridiculous, but she will be laughing on the other side of her stupid face when the flyblown briefs she currently uses as dishcloths become priceless collector’s items.

  And in the increasingly likely event of a British Brexit, the sale of these fetishised items will then fund our family’s relocation to the newly independent free Scotland, from where I will harry the airwaves of England and Wales with liberally biased left-wing satire, the Lord Haw-Haw of sparkling-wine socialism.

  In retrospect, the scrum of the Scottish independence referendum looks dignified compared to the dirty war of Brexit. In Scotland, politicians on both sides of the divide at least seemed sincere in their beliefs, rather than selfishly using the nation’s concerns about its future to try and secure theirs.

  Indeed, the day when Boris Johnson cynically accused the pro-Europe and ‘part-Kenyan’ President Obama of being ancestrally ill-disposed towards Britain marks the moment at which the mayor of London changed from being merely a twat into a full-blown cunt.

  It is appropriate to describe Boris Johnson with pure witless swearing, for that is all he deserves. He is of a political class where any insult, no matter how vicious, is acceptable, if it is delivered with the rhetorical flourishes and classical allusions of the public-school debating society. Hence, Cameron can scornfully sneer at Jeremy Corbyn and describe Dennis Skinner as a dinosaur, yet the venerable beast himself is dismissed from the house when he calls Cameron merely ‘dodgy’.

  The problem for the pro-Europe voter currently is that while obviously despising Cameron as both a person and a politician, one nonetheless wants him to prevail over Johnson, Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and the Brexit camp.

  And as the giant moth arrived above the beach, momentarily blocking out the Japanese sun itself, and set about the three-headed lizard with electric rays from its head, I continued to ponder the Brexit camp
aign.

  ‘Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ asks William Blake of the Tyger. It was instinct that drove the moth and the lizard to fight, not ethics. They were as they were. Likewise, Johnson’s Brexit position represents only a fight for personal betterment, not a considered view on Europe.5

  There is an African fly that lays its eggs in the jelly of children’s eyes, the hatching larvae blinding them by feeding on the eye itself. But the fly has no quarrel with the child. It is merely following its nature.

  Likewise, Boris Johnson, a vile grub laying his horrible eggs in the soft jelly of the EU debate, has no agenda beyond his own advancement. He believes in nothing, and neither does his spiritual soulmate, the eye-scoffing African fly.

  We cowered in our cave, the twins and I, and watched the combat of the monsters. The honest open war of the giant moth and three-headed lizard made Prime Minister’s Questions seem contrived and banal. The earth shook beneath their feet, triggering tidal waves and rivers of lava from the atoll’s smouldering volcano; vast explosions of startled birds scarred the sky; the landscape cracked. There was no ‘Mr Speaker’, no ‘order, order’, no classical allusion and no drawing-room wit. There was only war, terrible war.

  Can we please keep this sort of hysteria out of the EU debate? We need sober analysis and reflection, not this. Richard Whittington

  Stewart Lee: a propagandist masquerading as a comedian, who is promoted as sophisticated and as a confidence trick to make people buy into the narrative. Williebaldtschmidt

  I suppose everyone has a right to write as much unfunny, impenetrable gobbledygook mas they judge will make them rich and famous. Freespeechoneeach

  Painfully unfunny as per usual. Markb35

  It’s worth saying that Japan had a vending machine selling used schoolgirl’s panties for only about three weeks 20 years ago. But if you do allow that even for a number of days, don’t be surprised if people never let you live it down. Saintexmin