March of the Lemmings Read online

  2 Crazy days! The objectification of women was used to battle discrimination against racial minorities. Fourteen years later, Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth explored the same dichotomy in ‘Kool Thing’, a duet with a sporting Chuck D of Public Enemy.

  3 Curiously, I avoided comparing Ferrari’s listenership to some kind of golem. I must have been having an off-day.

  4 Trump had retweeted Islamophobic tweets from the far-right group Britain First, which used video clips of random violent images as examples of unrelated Islamic extremism, mere days after the organisation’s deputy leader, Jayda Fransen, had been arrested over a speech made in Belfast. Jo Cox’s murderer had shouted ‘Britain First!’ as he killed her.

  5 This is the golem idea again, surely? The golem and I should get a room.

  6 I do appreciate now that sentences like this are why people voted for Brexit.

  7 Michael Gove and his fellow Leavers had falsely ascribed assumed pro-Brexit sentiment to the Queen, who, not allowed to address politics directly, responded in the only way she could: through millinery.

  How Toby Young got where he isn’t today

  14 January 2018

  The grindingly algorithmic controversialist Toby Young was always painfully and obviously in the oedipal shadow of his socialist intellectual father, Michael Young. Each of his desperately politically incorrect tweets was an attempt to cuckold and castrate his progenitor.

  Toby Young has wasted his life spitting cold mucus at a ghost and throwing clumps of his own hot excrement at a shade, a raging zoo monkey.1 Toby Young was at war with a phantom cloud of semen, long since turned to dust motes, bobbing on the west London thermals. But because I am kind and good, I take no pleasure in the slow-motion farce of his downfall.

  On Wednesday night, the probable reason for the sudden twin resignations of the self-styled ‘right-of-centre maverick’ from both the spurious universities regulator and the Fulbright Commission became clear. Despite having survived last week’s cataloguing of his hastily concealed career of context-free, non-character-driven, monetisable offence, on Monday evening Toby Young finally ran out of options and fell on his own cucumber spiraliser.

  Even though he was defended by his chum, Boris Piccaninny Johnson, as being a ‘caustic wit’, the maverick self-styled ‘Toadmeister’ had to go. Because while the national media slept or commissioned supportive think-pieces from Young’s wealthy and powerful celebrity friends, the London Student newspaper was about to reveal that the Maverick Toadmeister had attended a secret conference on ‘intelligence’, featuring notorious speakers including, in previous years, white supremacists and a weird farright paedophilia apologist called Emil.2

  Of course, attending a secret conference alongside white supremacists does not amount to endorsing their ideals. I once attended a performance of We Will Rock You, the Queen musical by Ben Elton and Queen, and if anything, it made me despise the dreadful group even more than I did before, from a position of greater understanding.3 The Maverick Toadmeister, by his own admission, attended the secret event only for a few hours, only sat at the back, didn’t inhale any of the Nazism that was being handed round, and nor did he supply any to anyone else.

  But on Monday night, the Maverick Toadmeister realised that even declarations of love from his greatest champions – the environmental opportunist Michael Gove, the Daily Mail hate-funnel Sarah Vine and the napkin’n’knick-knack guru Kirstie Allsopp – would not overwhelm the taint of his incidental association with genuine white supremacists.

  For God’s sake, that’s what paranoid community activists in ’70s blaxploitation movies thought white folk were doing – having secret meetings about how to stop them breeding – and it turns out we are! In fact, that’s the plot of the martial arts and black power musical Three the Hard Way (Gordon Parks Jr, 1974), but now with Toby Young as a curious bystander watching the evil Dr Fortrero plot to wipe out the black population and claiming it’s research for a forthcoming speech.

  If Boris Watermelon Smile Johnson’s brother, Boris Johnson Junior, intended the appointment of the Maverick Toadmeister to the universities regulator to counteract the influence of the Political Correctness Gone Mad brigade, it’s fair to say he may have overplayed his hand somewhat.

  The Maverick Toadmeister’s fellow secret conference attendee, Richard Lynn, for example, advocates that predominantly white American states secede from the Union, making them dangerously likely to sink into the sea under the excess weight of the massive arses, and brains, of their remaining inhabitants.

  The question presupposed by the title of the Maverick Toadmeister’s best-selling book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People had been fairly comprehensively answered.

  Asked last week to comment on his attendance at a second intelligence jamboree, this time in Canada, a clearly discombobulated Maverick Toadmeister said he had been giving the ‘Amanda Holden Memorial Lecture’.4 Amanda Holden? Les Dennis’s ex-wife? Was the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home’s celebrity ambassador now a eugenicist? And also dead? Thank God Dustin Gee didn’t live to see the memory of The Laughter Show tarnished so.

  I knew that there had been a famous science writer called Constance Holden. Had the Maverick Toadmeister, as no one is calling him ever, suffered a slip of his toad tongue? There wasn’t time to check the facts, sadly, as the witch-hunt countdown clock was ticking. Needless to say, I immediately mobilised my massive bullying Twitter following of furious politically correct snowflake hypocrites to have Amanda Holden, eugenics apologist, erased from history.

  By Wednesday, public pressure had seen Holden lose her role as the face of Alpen, the colonic-cleansing breakfast dust. And on Thursday, Holden was digitally erased from every episode of Britain’s Got Talent.

  Then I realised the Maverick Toadmeister had made a misspeak. He had meant Constance Holden. Amanda Holden was not a Nazi (nor, it turned out, was Constance Holden), and she was not dead.

  I don’t know the Maverick Toadmeister and I have never met him, though he did once make a winsome face at me across a corridor at Heston services, Britain’s worst services, on the M4.5 I recognised him from somewhere, but something about his curious smirk and his strange gait made me assume he was a lesbian, dressed as a homosexual, who had assumed I was a lesbian dressed as a heterosexual man and was trying to pick me up. What a tangled web we weave.

  But where now for the Maverick Toadmeister? Can even vile jam-rags like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail employ him now? Who calls themselves, as an adult, the ‘Toadmeister’ anyway? And ‘maverick’ is what the commissioner shouts at Dirty Harry. It’s not what Dirty Harry tells the commissioner he is himself. That would be very uncool. Who does these strange and desperate things? Someone in search of an identity that has eluded them.

  Sometime around twenty years ago, Toby Young started being nasty about people less fortunate and privileged than him, and like a shit Clarkson, he found it was easy to do and paid good money; and then the wind changed, and Toby Young was stuck with the horrible face he had made. And now people all over the Internet will be drawing foreskins on his bald head. For ever.

  Hooray! Thank god we live in an age when no man who has ever made a filthy joke, or admitted to being sexually attracted to women, or repelled by gay sex can ever hold down a public post again. (Unless he comes from a protected ‘minority, natch!) Yes, he was an obnoxious, unfunny little Tory toad, but at least he had one thing going for him – he was funnier than Stewart Lee. Offshoretomorrow

  ‘vile jam rags’ is too far to go Guardian – please have the article withdrawn until it is rewritten at least without that, which was where I stopped reading. Tolkny

  Lee has got his thesaurus out to prove nothing. A pointless article. Lee is like a left wing Bernard Manning … a throwback way past his sell by date. Marcus L

  Lee appeals to a narrow base who like his formulaic predictable humour. Fair enough everyone has different tastes. But his too-cool-for-school bashing of Queen is surely a bit tired now. Does he
really think he matches them for talent and memorable work? Think about it – anyone could have written this article or Lee’s output. It written to a formula. You would not know it was Lee’s if his name was not at the top – it could have been any left wing comedian. Now go and see how easy it is to write ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. BobMcGhee

  Why use 100 words, when one can get paid for a few thousand? Possibly accurate, but oh so boring Mr Lee. Yorkyman

  At least some of Young’s tweets were humorous. He gets bonus points for his ability to enrage the hysterical PC brigade. MarkB35

  It is possible to agree with every word of Stewart Lee’s takedown of Toby Young and yet wish it hadn’t been printed. I’ve started to think that all this normalized abuse just leads to everyone thinking that abuse is the new journalism. I wasn’t a fan of the ‘jam-rag’ quip (nothing to do with Young, and normalizes misogyny). Or the nudge-wink-iness of the ‘homosexual-dressed-as-a-lesbian’ bit. Or of the fact that it tells us nothing we didn’t already know, in a style already overused by Young himself. I’d like to see something elegant and excoriating for a change, instead of just reading a series of journalists calling each other cunts. I’d like it if we could be better than this, not as nasty, but somehow still funny and not smug or self-righteous. Piece of piss, I reckon. JoAnne Harris, Twitter

  Much as I hate Toby Young this is just the usual thing: a predictable, polite middle-class person talking to other predictable, polite middle-class people like himself. In fact, Stewart Lee is not really a comedian, he’s more of a smart-arse, something else altogether. Mike Spilligan, Twitter

  1 An orangutan threw its excrement into my gran’s hair from its moated island in Dudley Zoo in 1972. I think this had a big impact on me as a child as I keep mentioning it.

  2 Emil Kirkegaard.

  3 I don’t know what it is about Queen. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which is genius, apart, everything about their sound and sensibility just makes me feel queasy, like choking down an incredibly rich dessert. It’s so arch and insincere and knowing. I don’t have such a visceral reaction to any other music really, and the time I was sent to review the Queen musical was one of the most uncomfortable nights of my life. And I was aware that I was alone in that massive room in not finding it transcendental. I think I must, without knowing it, associate the band with some buried childhood trauma. I am sorry.

  4 The Maverick Toadmeister genuinely said this.

  5 Toby Young did make a funny face at me as he walked past me at Heston services, Britain’s worst service station, about a decade ago. I had met him for about five seconds four years previously, at some theatre awards, where he asked me if I would appear on a reality TV show about rowing, and I said no. The face he made at Heston services was neither friendly nor unfriendly. It was just kind of weird and superior, as if he knew something that he thought made him better than me. But I don’t think it was personal; that’s just what his face is like. Similarly, I can’t help having a naturally sarcastic-sounding voice. A few years later, the Maverick Toadmeister was asked to review a book I wrote on Radio 4, and he said: ‘I’ve always thought of Stewart Lee’s comedy as doing the opposite of what really good comedy should do. He essentially uses comedy to browbeat people into agreeing with his rather dogmatic left-wing political points of view. It’s as though he’s essentially taking what is the sort of prevailing politically correct dogma of his generation and aggressively ridiculing anyone who doesn’t sign up to it, using comedy as an instrument to enforce conformity, not as a means of subversion. He’s a red-faced man jabbing his finger in my face because I don’t agree with him. He may as well be playing to an empty room, for all the concessions he makes to the audience. His refusal to concede to the audience is part of an ongoing desire to be taken seriously, but someone who wants to be taken so seriously is quite hard to take seriously.’ Only a few years previously he had opined in print that I was a ‘genius’. Make your mind up, baldy!

  The reference here to dressing as a lesbian relates to an article Young wrote in 2004 about how he pretended to be a lesbian to get into lesbian bars. He probably didn’t even do that. I mean, I feel sorry for him, to be honest. What a corner he has backed himself into, with all his stupid cheap shit.

  My desperate bid to match Boris Johnson’s colossal lies

  28 January 2018

  When Boris Johnson announced in a press conference on Thursday his intent to fly to the moon in a basket carried by enormous swans, as part of an ongoing quest to seek out new post-Brexit trading partners outside the EU, it seemed the logical end point of a political career characterised by the propagation of elephantine falsehoods. And yet no lie is too big, it seems, and Johnson endures.1

  Any half-decent journalist would have destroyed Johnson’s moon-swan lies immediately, but his Friday-morning interview with Nick Robinson on Radio 4 displayed the feeble indulgence we have come to expect from the gumless Today programme.

  Johnson told Robinson he was looking forward to meeting the moon king, Irdonozur, who he thought was ‘exactly the sort of person we should be in business with’, and Robinson didn’t even feel the need to point out that no such lunar monarch exists.

  Robinson didn’t even intervene when Johnson declared that he wasn’t ‘the least bit scared of moon-piccaninnies or moon-bumboys for that matter’, and that he would be taking his friend, the convicted fraudster and gold smuggler Darius Guppy, to the moon with him, and that Darius would have any disobedient moon-piccaninnies and moon-bumboys ‘knocked to the ground’ and covered in horse manure.2

  Footage on CBBC’s Newsround later, of Johnson standing by a bus emblazoned with the legend ‘Let’s fly to the moon in a swandrawn basket and knock the moon-bumboys to the ground and cover them in horse manure’, barely even a raised eyebrow from presenter Ricky Boleto,3 who seemed stricken with a terrible ennui beyond his years at the very thought of more of Johnson’s colossal and time-consuming lies.

  Meanwhile, predictable newspaper cartoons slung the familiar image of the crash-helmeted Johnson, waving flags while suspended from a zip wire, beneath a flock of soaring swans.4

  Even seasoned political observers finally find themselves asking: what on earth is Johnson playing at? Some think the answer lies in the Dead Cat Strategy, pioneered by the Tories’ former attack dog, Lynton Crosby. Crosby’s main contribution to political discourse has been the idea that a massive distraction, such as throwing a dead cat on a table or announcing your intention to fly to the moon with Darius Guppy in a swan-drawn basket, will divert public attention from some ongoing political disaster, such as the entire last eighteen months.

  Some cynics even suggest that the public disgrace of Johnson’s crony Toby Young was actually dead-cat driven. Did the Conservative media machine maintain Young’s implausible career only so as to have a dead cat ready to fling on the table when they needed one? Was Toby Young the Lee Harvey Oswald of the failing Brexit negotiations?

  I’m not sure that Johnson’s pathological dishonesty is quite that calculated. I suspect he liked the attention that his lies got him. But suddenly he is being trounced in the funny-toff stakes by Jacob Tree-Frog, and his Brexit lies – the £350 million a week for the NHS, the fabled ‘cake and eat it’ trade deal – are dissolving like David Davis in a hail of hot facts.

  So Johnson is having to mouth ever more vast lies to get the attention he once earned from lesser falsehoods, like a veteran motorcycle stuntman, long past his peak, incrementally driven towards an audience-maintaining jump over a massive lake of sharks that he knows will finally kill him.

  On my desk is a stack of commemorative Brexit coins, price £4.99 each. I ordered them from a Brexiteer on eBay in a moment of mean-spiritedness, because they are emblazoned with the misspelt slogan ‘I voted to get back our sovereign independance’. The tragedy of it, the black, black comedy of the thing.5

  But the coins made me remember the act I did on the fledgling comedy circuit, back in the 1980s, and how it related to the nuclear escalation
of Johnson’s weaponised lies. Older comedy fans may remember the early days of ‘alternative’ comedy, when bills weren’t simply twenty-something stand-ups in trousers remembering recent cultural ephemera. Back then, those pub-back-room bills featured a host of absurd ‘spesh’ acts: the Amazing Mr Smith, who sang satirical songs with his head in a birdcage full of actual birds; Steve Murray, who dismembered teddy bears while doing an impression of Tommy Cooper; the Iceman, a favourite of mine, who stood on stage with a big block of ice, describing how and why it was melting; and the late Malcolm Hardee, who, among other things, could make his testicles look like various British wartime politicians.6

  My own spesh involved me stuffing, or giving the impression of stuffing, a succession of coins of various foreign currencies up my back passage, while dressed in a tutu and playing the bodhrán. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Icelandic 50 krona coin, the 50 krona. Here we go …’7

  I was starting to make a name for myself, although admittedly that name was Roger Rectum Currency. Then suddenly, sometime around 1985, along came the uber-clown Chris Lynam, who launched actual lit fireworks from his actual anus, and now a man pretending to put yen into his wasn’t impressive any more. I soon switched to straight stand-up, as it happened a more lucrative, but arguably less dignified, art form.

  Suddenly, his lies no longer igniting the public imagination like they once did, Johnson himself is Roger Rectum Currency in his managed decline, needing to draw the public eye with ever more extravagant lies.