March of the Lemmings Read online

  Parroting the views of the privileged and entitled. Poor effort. Pleasetryalternative

  1 In 2013, the Home Office authorised vans with intimidating slogans on them to drive around areas populated by immigrants. The use of the phrase ‘Go Home’ resonated depressingly with the sort of racist abuse experienced by immigrants, both legal and illegal, and prefigured the public-relations disaster of the Windrush scandal five years later, when it turned out loads of Jamaicans who had been told to ‘go home’ by Theresa May and Amber Rudd were already at home, here, legally, anyway.

  2 In a survey undertaken by Ipsos MORI in 2011, 64 per cent of the country thought immigration was bad for Britain. In March 2019, after nearly three years of hearing immigration discussed in a post-referendum context, 16 per cent fewer people thought that, with 48 per cent of the country feeling immigration had had a negative impact. Perhaps the threat of seeing friends, co-workers and family members deported made people realise the mysterious ‘other’ that was ruining everything was actually people they knew and loved.

  3 Prime minister of Jamaica.

  4 The same week as the Windrush scandal broke, Theresa May had to attend a dinner for the Commonwealth Heads of Government. Awkward! (as the young people of today say).

  5 This is all true.

  6 This isn’t.

  7 Nor is this.

  8 While we were in Prague with the kids in 2017, I was able to bargain my way into a night out on my own. My plan was to sit in the Old Town Square, next to the bar where Kafka used to drink and Einstein used to play the violin, and drink Czech beer, while reading Kafka’s The Hunger Artist in its entirety, opposite the windows of the very flat where it was written. Just as I was about to finish the novella, a young Englishman, who proclaimed himself a fan of my work, sat down to join me, amazed that it was really me drinking and reading alone in Prague. He was a nice enough bloke, in town for a stag night and separated from his friends, and being recognised is a small price to pay for my privileges, but all the same, it punctured a perfect experience. It is as nothing, however, compared to the Jewish comedian David Baddiel’s contemplative visit to Auschwitz, during which a young man came up to him to ask if there was another series of Fantasy Football in the pipeline.

  The first time I ever met my half-sister, we went to try and find a quiet pub in the afternoon. I hadn’t ordered, and had barely spoken to her, before a man drinking alone started pestering me for a photo. I asked him, very politely, if on this occasion it would be OK if I didn’t do that. I didn’t want my social interaction with my newly discovered sister to be characterised from the outset by me having to pose for photos with a stranger, while she waited, patient and embarrassed, and he fumbled with camera-phone functions he didn’t know how to use, or worse still, asked the barman if he’d take it. I assume it was the same man, ‘Harry’, who tweeted, a few hours later, ‘Don’t meet your heroes they say. If that hero happens to be Stewart Lee it’s excellent advice. What a cunt. A chance conversation in a pub in Norwich suggests he’s a dislikable individual. Also fatter, greyer and drinking more than you’d imagine.’ The weird thing is, we left without ordering because of him, so I don’t know how he knew how much I was drinking. He was the one who was in a pub on his own in the afternoon too.

  9 I love faggots and peas. My mother’s Black Country-born father fed them to me as a child, when no one was looking. When the kids were young, I convinced them a dish of faggots and peas was a rare delicacy, and got them to eat it enthusiastically by telling them it was an important part of their cultural inheritance, a notion my wife has otherwise monopolised in favour of Irishness. Finally, this same wife, who is working class but has accidentally become middle class by appearing on Radio 4, told me I wasn’t to feed the children faggots any more, and any that were still in the freezer were ostentatiously thrown away before my eyes. My new favourite Black Country dish is grey peas, as served at the Great Western Pub, Corn Hill, Wolverhampton, and as soon as I have finished these footnotes I am going out to buy the ingredients – peas, onion, barley and bacon – so I can make a massive bowl of the stuff. Remember, though, before you eat loads of grey peas, I am currently too heavy to use certain waterslides.

  10 Being a record-collector nerd has been a useful device in all sorts of social situations all over the world, and I escaped being beaten up in an Oxford pub in 1989 by knowing all the different line-ups of Hawkwind. Having a working knowledge of the intermittently impressive Canadian national band The Tragically Hip was enormously helpful in avoiding violence in a potentially problematic sports bar in Prince George, British Columbia, in the summer of 1994, during the screening of an ice-hockey final. But now my office is full of records and CDs, more than I can ever process or love. I imagined someone would want them, or that they formed some valuable archive, but no one will, and they don’t. Everything is worthless now, and music just streams out of our devices like slurry. Now, I am just trying to throw away the plastic CD boxes and file everything away, so that there isn’t an awful job there for some poor child when I die. What a waste of a life.

  11 I have a Ford Focus. It’s the most practical motor I’ve owned since we had kids and is a very reliable family car with good all-round visibility. I wish I’d got one years ago, to be quite honest.

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

  14 May 2018

  Desperate for American co-operation with post-Brexit trade, Britain is hamstrung in her reaction to Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. A man in Southend-on-Sea, who just wanted bendy bananas, eats takeaway butterfly wings, and a nuclear missile hits Tel Aviv.1

  In July, Guardian and Observer readers, their furious tofusmeared faces red with righteous rage, will doubtless wish to greet visiting American president Donald Trump with well-punctuated placards, laced with Pythonesque whimsy.2

  Realpolitik appeasers like Boris Piccaninny Johnson assure us, with one eye on transatlantic trade deals in the dystopian post-EU wasteland he has engineered, that we must respect the office of the president of the United States. But Boris Watermelon Smiles himself previously described the current president, in 2015, as ‘unfit to lead the United States’, ‘clearly out of his mind’ and ‘stupefyingly ignorant’. Less impressive U-turns have given Richard Hammond whiplash.

  But life goes on, and the really important cultural questions blare from the Sunday supplement headlines. ‘Wham! Bam!! Pow!!! Have Superhero Movies Finally Grown Up?’ ‘Gnngh! Squish!! Yuk!!! Is Our Love Affair with the Smoothie Maker Finally Over?’ ‘Squelch! Squish!! Ker-ching!!! Has Porn Finally Entered the Mainstream?’

  At least one of these great debates is at last resolved. Porn has finally and undeniably entered the mainstream, like a massively mammaried Milk Tray man, slopping his pendulous udders one at a time through the unlocked hotel bedroom window of one Donald J. Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States of America.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt bequeathed the New Deal, Theodore Roosevelt the teddy bear. Donald J. Trump means even Sister Wendy Beckett may now have read about the president’s paid-off lover’s 2004 video vehicle, Toxxxic Cumloads 6.

  Obama was the first black president. And Donald J. Trump is the first porn president. He has pornified not the high street, not the world of fashion, but the whole world itself. What unregulated Internet access began, Donald Trump has finished, his porn-star affair inadvertently dissolving the last vestiges of modesty displayed by the world of monetised desire. And the phrase ‘porn star’ now sits comfortably in the mouths of Today programme presenters, TV newsreaders and year 4 schoolkids.3

  This presents a dilemma for Theresa May, who looks increasingly like something that lurches up at you on a ghost train. And so, in the interests of gender equality, does her husband, Mr Theresa May. How does the vicar’s daughter from Eastbourne court and entertain the president of porn, upon whom our post-Brexit future depends? My Whitehall mole has leaked Theresa May’s plans to welcome Trump in an appro
priately pornographic way.

  On Friday 13 July, at 11.08 a.m., President Trump and Melania Trump will be met on the tarmac at Heathrow airport by the prince and princess of British pornography, Ben Dover and his ex-wife Linzi Drew, who have been persuaded to partner up again in the interest of post-customs-union trade opportunities.4

  Having explained to the Trumps how the joke in Ben Dover’s name works, and that Ben Dover is not his real name (it is Simon Dover), the Drew-Dovers will then whisk the Trumps away in a Routemaster bus with a bouncy suspension, driven by the late Reg Varney.

  On the way, the Drew-Dovers will explain to the Trumps the fascinating differences between saucy home-grown British pornography and the more airbrushed fantasies of the American version, and what this tells us about our two historically close nations and their unbreakable special relationship.

  While the president will doubtless have a lot to contribute to this discussion, his wife is expected to sit in silent, smouldering resentment, like a big pile of disappointed hate, brushing away any attempts at physical contact, as Ben Dover tries to smooth over the situation with seaside-postcard humour and amusing anecdotes about lube-based mishaps on the set of Ben Dover’s English Muffins.

  At 1.17 p.m., the Trumps will arrive in newly gentrified Soho, where they will be met by the billionaire pornographer and former Birmingham City chairman David Gold and his daughter, the sex-toy retailer Jacqueline Gold (CBE). The Golds will show the Trumps around the historic pornographic district, temporarily restored to its ’70s glory, with swathes of hairy suede-denim filth flung over the contemporary ciabatta outlets, bringing innocent joy to Donald Trump’s orange face.

  Now hopefully suitably buttered up, and in a brief respite from pornography, the first family will proceed to the otter enclosure at London Zoo, where the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, dressed as a glistening wet otter,5 will cavort and frolic to the Trumps’ delight with real otters in their pond and toss a stone from hand to hand, hopefully disorienting Donald Trump to the point where he will accidentally agree some kind of trade deal.

  Melania will be invited to choose which otter she would like made into a hat, and the doomed mammal will then be slaughtered and skinned in front of her by a vengeful Terry Nutkins, to the obvious distress of schoolchildren, before the bloodied pelt is presented to Mrs Trump on a silver tray.6

  That evening, at Buckingham Palace, alongside the royal family and armed forces veterans, the Trumps will enjoy a late-night charity gala screening of the Stormy Daniels Gulf War-themed 2007 sex comedy Operation: Desert Stormy, with a Kentucky Fried Chicken finger buffet.

  Oh, for God’s sake, it’s going to be awful for everyone, much worse than all the rubbish I’ve written above. And someone’s bound to get killed.7

  I find that leftie humour relaxes the face muscles. Isleoflucy

  I regret to inform Mr. Lee that Terence Nutkins ‘passed’ (i.e. departed the mortal realm) in 2012. I sincerely hope this doesn’t come as too much of a shock; I am aware of Mr. Lee’s age and physical condition, but there’s really no way to break this gently. Dee Emsey

  Shame on you. Terrys family lawyers might already be writing the letter … LeftOfCentre

  Frankie Boyle is far better at focusing and channelling his scorn, which is just what a piece like this needed (and lacked). Haemodroid

  Kentucky Fried Chicken finger buffet. He was in the Magic Band. Clark Gwent

  Erdogan’s visit would have been a good subject for this article but simpler to go for the easy target. I guess this is populist satire. Voyageresque

  Is this the famous British sense of humour? It must be an acquired taste. Because this smug snide style of writing, with no content or wit, does nothing for me. I am Swiss but educated at Oxford. Kusomak

  Ben Dover’s real name is Simon Honey not Simon Dover. Drumboy

  As a species we will likely kill ourselves. It won’t be the end of the world. Just the end of the human one. It will be a shame and a wasted opportunity, as we could have created something close to a paradise on this blue gem of a planet. Perhaps it is just not in our nature to live peacefully. Perhaps we couldn’t stand paradise anyway and would destroy it as soon as we had it in our reach. Unbritannia

  the man has built two of the best golf courses in the world up in scotland, turnberries and aberdeen, with his own money. i will be there with a few friends to welcome to these shores. skintman

  A vile piece written by, I imagine, a vile man. DrBill

  How daring for a mainstream newspaper to publish a piece bashing Trump! Its about as brave as coming out as heterosexual. Yawn. Luka69

  I’m impressed with your knowledge of porn stars. This must have required extensive ‘research’. StuartBaker

  Stormy Daniels is not a porn star. She is a person. How she earns her living is up to her. I detest the dehumanisation of her in this piece and throughout the press. Trump has reportedly been unfaithful with other women, but that doesn’t tickle readers’ fantasies in the way that this one does. Lee is exploiting her as much as he is mocking Trump. BeckyThatcher

  There is no point in public school educated, neoliberal class warriors laughing at Donald Trump. It’s over. Morrisseysmiff

  ‘it’s going to be awful for everyone, much worse than all the rubbish I’ve written above.’ Well, Mr Lee, I very much doubt that. Rest assured that whilst your increasingly incomprehensible columns will no doubt continue to be a testimony to your superior (public school) intellect, us humble proles will manage. There are many places where life is a miserable and dangerous attempt to survive; and where Trump is an irrelevance. Maybe you should travel more … Quietrich

  ‘Stewart Lee appears in benefit shows for Action on Hearing Loss’. They should be so lucky. MsSnoopier

  Is not tofu-smeared a racist idea – I happily read the guardian and live in a country whose population eats tofu many times a week or daily. Why turn it into a insult as it directly insults those people, my kids included, who enjoy eating tofu. MattyJ101

  1 I’m not entirely sure what I meant by this now.

  2 Trump’s postponed visit was finally happening.

  3 The main driving force behind the loss of my children’s innocence has been them overhearing news coverage of Donald Trump. Because of Trump I have had to define the words ‘pussy’ and ‘porn star’, and explain the idea of being urinated on by prostitutes. This is Trump’s gift to the world.

  4 The Drew-Honeys’ son, Tyger, was the child star of the sitcom Outnumbered. I sometimes worried that our kids were treated weirdly by people because of what we do. I think I should get a sense of perspective.

  5 Writing in the Telegraph about the Olympics in 2012, Boris Johnson, then mayor of the host city, said, ‘There are semi-naked women playing beach volleyball in the middle of the Horse Guards Parade immortalised by Canaletto. They are glistening like wet otters.’

  6 I didn’t realise Terry Nutkins was dead when I wrote this, unforgivably, and would have written it differently if I had known the otter-loving naturalist had passed. Sorry.

  7 I was wrong. Nobody died. But kids at my daughter’s school, walking in crocodile formation on a trip, saw Trump’s cortège drive along Camden Parkway and were quietly horrified.

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

  20 May 2018

  Bear-baiting is officially banned by the bear-loving, politically correct, snowflake brigade. Go and marry a bear and live in a wood eating worms if you love bears so much! And I think you’ll find it was Adam and Eve!! Not Adam and Rupert!!! But after bear-baiting, Thomas Markle teasing is the next best thing.1

  The least I expect for my tax contribution to the royal coffers is to see a future princess’s confused elderly father thrown to the dogs by Buckingham Palace, and hounded and manipulated by newspapers whose tenacity and cynicism he could never have predicted. That’s entertainment!

  Thank heavens our politicians are seeing some sense, as they peep out from the pockets of the press barons, by
attempting to kick the Leveson report into the long grass, where it belongs, along with some Fanta cans and an old, torn-up Razzle.

  This week, I wanted to write about the beautiful synchronicity of the Leveson recommendations being declared as unnecessary at the same time as Thomas Markle gets pulverised by the press, the paparazzi’s piss-tears over Princess Diana’s death a distant memory. But I have to file these columns on Thursday, and you, reading this, now know more about what actually happened after Thomas Markle’s heart scare than I do. Perhaps things have already ended tragically and a beatified Thomas Markle is being declared the King of Hearts, the People’s Award-Winning Seventy-Three-Year-Old Television Lighting Cameraman, by the same tabloids that ran apparently staged photos of him buying a toilet at a DIY centre last week. I can’t write this. I’m not Psychic Sally. But Doris says, ‘Look after your feet.’ And Betty’s ring is in the budgie’s cloaca.

  So, in other world news, an unpopular politician has made an alliance with dangerous religious fundamentalists and inflamed passions on both sides of a contentious border in a desperate bid to maintain power. No! I don’t mean Mr Trump in Israel!! I mean Mrs May in Northern Ireland!!!

  There! That’s how satire works! But satire isn’t as easy as I make it look, week after week, especially when the actual real news reads increasingly like a poorly plotted dystopian science-fiction novel written as badly as possible by a disillusioned Dan Brown in an attempt to sabotage his own career.

  The opening of Trump’s new Israel embassy, for example, suggests he is courting the support of millions of American Christian fundamentalists, who believe that when the Jews reclaim Jerusalem, the Apocalypse will begin, and with it Christ’s Second Coming, which American Christian fundamentalists want even more than an end to abortion rights.

  To suggest that the Jerusalem embassy isn’t opening for the benefit of the Israelis isn’t to legitimise or delegitimise the notion of a Jewish homeland, but to ask if it has been opened instead for the benefit of the American Christian fundamentalist hate preachers Robert Jeffress and John Hagee. The Christian Chuckle Brothers led prayers at the ceremony and have said, respectively, that all Jews were going to hell and that Hurricane Katrina was an overzealous divine attempt to squash a gay parade.