March of the Lemmings Read online

  This seemed mean-spirited and irrelevant, for example: ‘resentful foundling Michael Gove’. Lee being an adoptee does not make it right or excuse it any more than my father dying when I was 11 allows me to say ‘half-orphaned Mr X was left wondering what his life would have been if his father had not choked his arteries to death prematurely in an effort to avoid his son’s difficult teenage years.’ DJS8

  Usually laugh at this, but this is just vile. Hateful stuff today Stuart, just when we need the opposite. No doubt Hitler would have enjoyed it, with all your Nietzsche references you would be turning into his favourite comedian. Richyork

  ‘I personally know nothing about psychiatry, philosophy, moral philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, psychological profiling, cultural history, politics, linguistics, or the science of personality’ Then why are you writing this stuff? Is this the whinging libs version of ‘I knows what I knows, guv, though I knows nuthink’? And I thought the Daily Mail was a bile filled garbage bin. Harbringer

  Aren’t comedians supposed to be funny? Poisonous hate-filled bile, and the rant of someone who is seriously disturbed. Mdebkk

  What was the point of this pretty spiteful attack on Gove and his wife? Isn’t it merely another petty grievance by some disaffected clod whose nose has been put out of joint somewhere along the line, causing frustration and an inability to shrug it off and learn from it like adults usually do? Juvenile name-calling not woth the space in the Guardian imo. Victormeldrew111

  Several major errors. The film referred to is Dirty Harry – it’s the ‘Scorpio’ serial killer who’s on the School bus. Also, Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ is an interrelated sequence of essays which can’t be read separately without distorting his intentions. Picking phrases at random to support a point is lazy and makes quoting from this source meaningless. Markfielding

  You’d better keep the comedy coming, Stewart, because it’s going to get a whole lot worse for your metropolitan liberal elite in the coming years! Happyhammer1982

  As a self-confessed ‘irreparably damaged personality’ one might advise you to trial some sort of talking-therapy. It may prevent you making errors in ‘analysing’ other’s personality defects. Carflosalbertos1970

  Posh boys puts the boot into posh boy. Tony Griffiths

  The champagne socialists had Ben Elton now they have Stewart Lee, funny how history is repeating itself. The Royal Oak

  Another privately educated Oxbridge chap giving it to the great unwashed, make that man Guardian editor! Rainbownation

  If it’s real sexism you want – proper, vicious prejudice of the most misogynistic kind – allow me … to offer you [this]: ‘As a student, David Cameron is rumoured to have put his penis into a dead pig. To outdo him as an adult, in an act even more bizarre and obscene, Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist.’ Sarah Vine, Daily Mail

  1 Gove and I were both published in the same 1985 anthology of adolescent poetry by children attending fee-paying schools, Independent Voices III (but remember, I was on a charity bursary and then a part-scholarship, so I am free from blame). My poem was an innocuous and forgettable moan about gender identity. Gove’s was a sinister attack on the sporty, non-adopted, posh boys who stole the girls that were rightfully the narrator’s concubines, and it read like the sort of thing that would turn up in the personal papers of someone who went on to commit a high-school massacre. One could argue that what Gove has done in enabling Brexit is worse.

  2 Do not google this Internet meme. Not safe for work.

  3 This whole para, scuffed up a bit, pretty much ended up as material in the Content Provider show, a rare example of prose material being directly transferable to the messier medium of stand-up.

  4 Is it worth reminding everyone that prominent Leavers spent the last forty years comparing EU politicians to Nazi camp guards, Stalinists and Satan, and then threw their Union Jacks out of the pram when, in February 2019, Donald Tusk made the comparatively innocuous observation that there was a special place in hell for Brexiteers who had promoted their cause ‘without even a sketch of a plan’ of how they might do it?

  5 Obviously, the intentional subtext here is that this is my own assessment of myself. Below-the-line critics in the Observer merely assumed I had given away my own feelings about myself accidentally, thus: ‘Jung pointed out that those who hurl insults invariably ascribe to others the failings that they fear they have themselves. This is a thoroughy nasty article … “an adopted misfit masking his low self-esteem” … do you recognise this person Mr Lee?’ Earnestpipewhistle

  6 Yes, this is a rewrite of a joke I did about the Loch Ness Monster on Comedy Vehicle, a rare example of reverse traffic from stand-up back into print.

  Roll over, Grandma, and tell Robert Peston the news

  26 February 2017

  What would a coup d’état look like? Would you even notice if one was happening all around you? Should we even be allowed to use the phrase ‘coup d’état’, now that we are leaving the EU? Should we return the very words themselves to the vile continent whence they came, and accept back in turn ‘le weekend’, ‘le camping’ and loads of leather-skinned racist pensioners currently dwelling in Spanish retirement complexes, to drain the resources of our imminently even more understaffed NHS?

  My late father used to have a drinking buddy, Krtek, nicknamed the Mole, who claimed to have been caught in the crossfire of a hostile ’50s coup in his east European homeland. Apparently, the Mole had been shot in the face in a street battle, leaving him with a permanent slit in his cheek, which he could open and close at will, like the oily perineal gland through which Michael Gove periodically oozes translucent globs of sincerity.1

  The Mole first made my father aware of his face skill in the late ’70s, at a family-run Italian restaurant, Da Corrado, on the then rural outskirts of south-east Birmingham. During dinner, in an argument about the veracity of the Dr Hook song ‘When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman (It’s Hard)’,2 the Mole deliberately shot a compressed jet of masticated cannelloni out of the portal of his cheek wound into my father’s hair, leading to a lifetime Da Corrado ban for the pair of them. This was particularly egregious for my father, who maintained that Da Corrado’s deep-fried squid was the best in the immediate Cheswick Green area, if not the West Midlands generally.3

  Nonetheless, as a child, the Mole’s punctured face, and the exotic fables of street-fighting that accompanied it, defined my idea of a coup d’état. There’d be tanks, wouldn’t there, rolling through redbrick squares, beautiful blonde Slavic girls putting hopeless blooms into gun barrels, and orders barked through megaphones by men with Nazi moustaches? And there’d be psychedelic bands, playing acid-polka music in mail-order Carnaby Street threads, driven underground by the military, awaiting respectable roles in the revolutionary government’s Ministry of Culture, three decades later. Wouldn’t there?

  Well, roll over, Grandma, and tell Robert Peston the news. This is not your mother’s seizure of political power. I suspect we Western liberal democracies may be in the middle of a very modern type of coup, namely an alt-coup. Look! I’ve used the hipster prefix ‘alt’, but in relation to reactionary politics, rather than in a phrase like ‘alt-country’, ‘alt-porn’ or ‘alt-crochet’. How thrillingly twenty-first-century! This is what it must have felt like to have been Milo Yiannopoulos!!

  (Sadly, it was only last month that I even learned of the existence of Trump-endorsed uber-troll Milo Yiannopoulos, who looked like a Tom of Finland pencil drawing of his Breitbart colleague James Delingpole. And already the boy has been dissolved in acid by his own suddenly squeamish paymasters. The news cycle moves so fast it’s hardly worth finding out about anything any more as it’s all sure to be irrelevant a week later. Note to self: that’s what ‘they’ want you to think.)4

  An American dictionary definition of ‘coup d’état’ I found online calls it ‘a quick and decisive seizure of governmental power by a strong military or political group …
[which] arrests the incumbent leaders, seizes the national radio and television services, and proclaims itself in power’. So does our home-grown alt-coup fit the bill?

  Well, undoubtedly, a coterie of far-right Conservatives are using the supposed Brexit mandate as an opportunity to pursue their extremist agenda, but the incumbent leaders weren’t arrested, they just ran away. And the leader of our current opposition, if you’ll permit me some Daily Telegraph blogger-type Schadenfreude, probably couldn’t get himself arrested if he tried! (This stuff’s easy! I’d be looking at a £250,000 book deal, if only I hadn’t been such a careless and vocal advocate of non-consensual human–insect sexual relations.)

  Unlike the classic coup, the new government hasn’t seized the national radio and television services, as there has been no need to do so, Laura Kuenssberg in particular being essentially just a state-sponsored town crier who runs around the filthy lanes in a Theresa May tabard, blowing a heraldic trumpet in celebration of every government pronouncement. Snitch!

  Indeed, earlier this week, the BBC chose to run a coincidentally timed documentary about the senile freeloaders in the irrelevant House of Lords, just as the honourable checks and balances were debating Brexit, the unelected peers intimidated from the sidelines by the unelected prime minister, sporting the face of a vicar’s daughter who had eaten a whole bucket of spicy huevos de toro before being told which part of the toro they were made from.

  Surely there must be at least a peerage waiting for the head of BBC scheduling, if the House of Lords isn’t abolished? Here’s hoping for an equally well-timed reappraisal of the professional/personal irregularities that led to expense-muddling Brexiteer and disgraced former defence secretary Liam Fox’s now forgotten 2011 resignation.5

  Sadly, the newspapers aren’t up to policing the coup either.6 When he interviewed Donald Trump for The Times, Michael Gove didn’t even notice that Rupert Murdoch was in the room.7 I’m not a respected journalist like Michael, I’m just a comedian, but to me Murdoch’s presence changes the whole story, and makes it look as if the far-right coup is part of an international network of corrupt self-interested parties – a massive scoop for Gove to miss.

  Unlike the coup that punctured the Mole’s face, in our altcoup not a shot was fired in anger. And yes, I am ignoring the shooting of Jo Cox, as Remainers have been asked not to ‘politicise’ it. And anyway, the gunman who shouted out ‘Britain First!’ during the killing has got the politicisation of that murder pretty much covered anyway.

  Thirty years later, I wonder if the story of the Mole and his squirty face-hole, like so many of my father’s tall tales, was true at all. It doesn’t matter. It made me happy. My father had also claimed, repeatedly, to be a member of a secret society of European packaging-company reps, whose members met in various continental sales-conference venues, where they dared each other to place bets on how many small white plastic sticks were concealed in their clenched fists.8 I don’t care whether this club existed. Either way, it is now a useful metaphor for Theresa May’s Brexit negotiating strategy. Thanks, Dad.

  ‘What would a coup d’état look like?’ I was in Ankara during the recent attempt, and it was pretty easy to tell cause of all the F16s buzzing the city, bombs being dropped on parliament, tanks rolling through the streets, gunfire all night long … Funnily enough a BBC documentary on the HoL and a dishonest Gove interview doesn’t quite feel like the same thing. Dickapocalypse

  Stu, I think Krtek means Mole. In Czech or Polish. Ajmb

  Aaah. Da Corrado. Saturday lunchtime hangout for all the local politicians of the area. A dire eatery. Arthur Sternom

  Puerile nonsense as usual. Tony35

  Milo’s articles are beautifully written with dazzling clarity rather than impenetrable verbiage. His book will find a publisher and will sell widely not least because his style is eminently readable and peppered with comedy gold. I can understand why he induces envy from lesser talented writers. AgnesMay

  Is Stewart Lee supposed to be a comedian? AvenellRoad

  One of us needs to check what is the definition of comedy as opposed to a bile filled incoherent unfunny rant. MikeHogger

  Us normal people love to hear the hysterical rantings of the loony left. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth. The western world is moving swiftly and sharply to the right. Get used to it losers. Britainforbrexit

  Well, that’s 10 minutes of my life I won’t get back … Gruntymalunty

  Ostracizing/demonizing Milo in this way is the direct equivalent of banning foreign people from entering a country. Oh, the hypocrisy! Even the most mighty moralists, like Lee, can fall into the mainstream medias’ clutches. Deianera

  ‘I’m just a comedian’, no, you aren’t. The requires being funny. Not just blathering on about your wierd political opinions. Marcus Wolfson

  You’re not a comedian, comedians should make people laugh not provoke a nervous embarrassed titter at best. A hangover from the alt comedian days maybe, though they all sold out in the end anyway. Birney

  Krtek wasn’t ‘nicknamed’ the Mole. It’s his actual name. That’s what krtek means in Czech. Not the most creative nickname. Cerealcat

  1 My father, who ran his own cardboard supply consultancy service from the spare room in his house in Featherstone Crescent, Solihull, and was hilarious, was inexplicably friendly with a man who had been something significant in Soviet-era Hungary. And this man did have a bullet hole in his face. And both he and my father had foreign wives, which may have been what drew them together in monocultural Solihull. The man was not called the Mole. The Mole was an animated Czech series about a hard-working Communist mole, which was shown on BBC children’s TV in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Even as a child I suspected it contained some subversive hidden message, and have since bought a Christmas ornament of the character from a Prague market.

  2 My father was convinced that this Dr Hook song held the key to understanding all human relationships, and he would sigh sagely to the lyrics when it came on the radio. His father, in turn, thought that ‘Atmosphere’, by Russ Abbot, was, and I quote, ‘a haunting melody’.

  3 In the ’70s, Da Corrado’s Italian restaurant was on the fringes of Solihull, where the Birmingham conurbation dissolved into the wild and mysterious Midsummer Night’s Dream Warwickshire wilderness, though today the city has overtaken it and the land around it has been bisected by the M42 and the forthcoming HS2 atrocity. Back then, Da Corrado’s provision of then-exotic dishes – cannelloni and carbonara, for example – and the fact that it seemed geographically beyond the law, created an outlaw vibe, as if what happened in Da Corrado’s stayed in Da Corrado’s. When, in my teens, my father finally allowed me to accompany him there, I was aware that he was allowing me into the secret adult world of sophisticated foods and swan-shaped napkins. Cheswick Green was a small newbuild ’60s estate near Da Corrado’s, made famous in a song on Napalm Death’s 1985 Hatred Surge demo tape called ‘Cheswick Green’.

  4 Yiannopoulos’s comically abrasive alt-right columns were briefly useful to Breitbart, with some fascists thinking the boy might win over youth support, but they quickly dropped him in 2017, when he appeared to advocate underage gay sex in a 2016 interview on a podcast called Drunken Peasants. Our own parliamentary far right – Priti Patel, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Anne-Marie Trevelyan – made similar overtures to the alt-right youth group Turning Point in January 2019, a relationship which is sure to end equally badly, but for different reasons.

  5 When he was defence secretary in 2010 and 2011, Liam Fox, it is now generally forgotten, took the tenant of his flat, the unaccredited Adam Werritty, around the world on MOD arms-deal trips, staying in economically shared hotel rooms. Would you trust this man to deliver ‘the easiest trade deal in history’?

  6 I’m not a professional political journalist, but I nearly got this coup thing right. Two years after this piece, as moderate Tories started to defect to a new and then-unnamed independent group, it became clear that Jacob Rees-Mogg’s European Rese
arch Group, and the UKIP members that joined the Conservative Party en masse to influence it from within, were organising a coup to take over the party, and thus the country. Old lefty Brexiteers that I know wanted out of the EU because Hungary and Poland had far-right governments, so it couldn’t be any good. Here, leaving the EU was in danger of delivering us a fascist regime of our own.

  7 That’s right! Rupert Murdoch was in the room when Gove interviewed Donald Trump, and he didn’t think it necessary to write that detail up. What else has he failed to disclose?

  8 I have since discovered that my father was indeed a member of such a club. The game was called Spoof, and the society was called the Spoof Club, and it met in Amsterdam and Brussels. I do not know if the Mole was also a member. My father is dead now. He wasn’t the sort of father who would save sensibly to help you in later life, but once, when I was a student, he rang my shared house’s payphone on a Friday night and, on finding that I couldn’t go to the pub because I had literally no money and wasn’t due any for weeks, he sent me £50 cash via the next post, though this was a figure I was subsequently to repay to him many times over, including, on one occasion, in the form of a substantial kidnapping ransom. There are a lot of things I didn’t know and will never know about my father, both trivial and significant. Was his painting of two gun dogs by the sporting artist Roland Knight really damaged when his third wife tried to shoot him with an air rifle and missed? Who knows. His favourite book, and indeed the only book he ever expressed an interest in, apart from a pornographic novel set on a slave plantation I once saw him reading, was The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908), by the Welsh poet W. H. Davies. He had read this book as a child and never forgotten it, and he bequeathed me his copy the last time I saw him, before he left the country. It was about a man who ran away for a life of gambling, smoking, drinking, telling tall stories and ‘occasionally taking exercise or going out for a walk’, which is essentially how my dad ended up living, in a land far away. And in so doing, I think, he won a kind of victory over the world on his own terms. I can relate. I read from The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp at his memorial service. It was, literally on this occasion, what he would have wanted. At my funeral, I would like my son to read from this book, because I am a narcissist.