March of the Lemmings Read online

  But Pope Francis has never made naked things leap from cakes, worn prideful footwear or drunk toasts to Satans, or indeed to any demons for that matter. Until now. And perhaps this explained the stunned horror that had spread across the usually illuminated fresco of his face on Wednesday.

  Writing in his 1536 treatise Zodiacus Vitae, Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus described the monarch of hell as a menacing being of prodigious size, with a swollen chest, a bloated face, flashing eyes, large nostrils and raised eyebrows, capable of changing his appearance into ever more terrifying aggregations of horror at will. And Pope Francis, it appeared, had broken with papal tradition to host Beelzebub and his entourage, for the first time ever, in Rome.

  First, the Lie-father and his caravan of infernal harlots were given a tour of the Sistine Chapel, the Lord of Flies now choosing to manifest himself dressed like a bee, with two dreadful ears and his hair painted in all colours, with a dragon’s tail.

  His retinue coiled around him in obedience, Beelzeboul stood before Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, which depicts souls weighed in the cosmic balance. But if Pope Francis had been intending to intimidate the White God into contrition by presenting him with the painting, he failed. Instead, Ba’al, having asked if this Michelangelo guy was available for hotel-lobby work, immediately took the form of a pile of dung, beset by flies, and slithered away.

  The tour over, the historic summit between Pope and Filth Lord began. As is customary, the two exchanged gifts. Francis gave Ba’al Zebûb a large medallion that depicted an olive, a symbol of peace. He also offered the Prince of Demons, who by now had become a goat-tailed calf with the face of a hornet, some of his latest writings (encyclicals), including his work on the need to protect the environment.

  Belzebuth offered the Pope a large box filled with novelty condiment dispensers. Pope Francis’s advisers had warned him that the Father of Lies might test him with an offering of unimaginable horror, which he was to accept unflinchingly, but Francis was taken by surprise. ‘This is a gift for you. The ketchup comes out of an asshole and the mustard is a shaved pussy,’ the demon was overheard saying. ‘I think you will enjoy them. I hope you do.’5

  As the demon, now in the form of a bat with duck’s feet and a lion’s tail, moved towards the exit, he expressed gratitude to the man he once called disgraceful for questioning his beliefs. The dispute was related to Beel d’Bobo’s proposal to destroy all that is good and drag Christ down to Hades to subject him to eternal torment – a policy the pontiff had said was not Christian. The library door opened and the bat-faced duck-lion could be heard braying, ‘What’s done is done, Frankie. Now how about that mustard pussy?’

  By the end of the half-hour private meeting, Pope Francis seemed forcedly jovial. He asked a wizened homunculus, swinging from the pendulous, bald testicles of the beast – who now appeared as a howling wolf with a lion’s head – what it gave its master to eat. It was unclear whether the being understood the remark, and it seemed to say, ‘Pizza?’ before smiling and answering, ‘Yes.’6

  Pope Francis knows evil. He knows the contents of the demonic tracts chained in the Vatican’s secret library; he has read the suppressed internal reports his predecessors abandoned unresolved; and he has spent a lifetime fabricating plausible theological excuses for the cruelties of man and nature. But he has never had to confront, until now, corruption in a manifestation so blank and uncomprehending and unapologetic.

  In short, Francis’s visitor this week forced him to acknowledge evil in a different form, evil at its most banal. And his own impotence before it was written on his defeated papal face.

  I stopped believing that the Guardian was a serious publication some years ago. This is why. Grandmechanteloup

  Obviously Stewart Lee thought this was very funny and clever. Buttercups

  Evil? This is not the definition of evil. The left has become the great intolerant. Any and all who do not agree get the evil, fascist, monster, buffoon, demon tag. Mr Trump is not Beelzebub. He is a man out of his depth who cannot accept criticism and seems to be existing in the Land of Bewilderment but he is not the great evil. Stewart Lee was once a comedian of great charm who offered his acerbic observations with effortless style. He’s floundering here (not unlike the north sea drama that lasted about 3 seconds and then disappeared without a trace). Sean1976

  I was busy concentrating on a young lady’s particularly complicated bra fastening when North Sea Hijack was on the telly in the early 80s. Never did see the end of the film. Never did get the bra fastening undone either. Repeatandfade

  This tries so hard it is pitiful. Joss Wynne Evans

  Keep on calling Trump lots of stupid ugly names. It’s only inflames more people to vote for him. This name calling just shows how childish the media are and what utter rubbish they will write to get viewers. It’s no wonder Guardian Journalists cry like sissies when they get body slammed.7 Bad Drivers

  1 The Trumps visited the Vatican, OK? That’s what this is about.

  2 Morrissey had been quoted earlier that week linking immigration policy, and a politically correct fear of speaking the truth, to the Manchester Arena bombing. Allowances were made by loyal fans. But there was worse to come.

  3 In 1980, I queued up outside Solihull cinema with Richard Hougham to try and get in to see North Sea Hijack. We were twelve and it was an AA certificate, so you had to be fourteen to get in. We thought we might pass for older, and Richard was excited because, as it was an AA, there should be ‘some good swearing’ in it. We got in. And sure enough, there was good swearing aplenty, my friends, and we loved it.

  4 I suspect this was some kind of mad hallucination brought on by baby-driven sleep deprivation, but at Les Invalides, in April 2009, I felt myself lifted off the ground by the back belt hook of my jeans and pushed up over the balcony, just for a second or so. There was no one else in the building, and I emerged ashen-faced into the plein soleil. My wife insists Napoleon was punishing me for calling his self-aggrandising mausoleum ‘arrogant and ridiculous’. She is jealous because, although I am an atheist and don’t believe in the afterlife, I have had three ghostly experiences. A week after my mother died, and when I had to bite the bullet and fulfil tour dates that couldn’t be rescheduled, she appeared to me in the foyer of Wolverhampton Civic Hall, looking totally alive in her favourite puffa coat and holding her handbag in front of her, smiling encouragingly, indicating she was OK and it was OK for me to go back to work. For a moment, I forgot she was dead, gave her a wave and, mouthing to her that I’d be with her in a minute, bowed my head back to sign the punters’ books in the merch queue. But then I realised she shouldn’t be there and snapped my gaze back to where she had been standing, but she was gone. I felt happy, not afraid or saddened in any way. But I know this was a hallucination, as my mum didn’t really like Wolverhampton and would not have come to see me there under any circumstances, even to communicate an important message from beyond the grave. My brain needed to jolt me into rejoining the flow, I think, and so it spun this little farewell scenario for me without my knowledge. When performing the routine about seeing dead comedians all around me, night after night for a year, which ended up in the fourth series of Comedy Vehicle, it was the feelings I experienced during this encounter with my mother’s ghost that I dredged up every night to try and perform it convincingly. It was emotionally exhausting, but cathartic on some level too.

  As well as being sexually assaulted by Napoleon, I have also, momentarily, seen hundreds of medieval monks bent in prayer in Fountains Abbey, the ruined walls around them suddenly reassembling themselves and then disappearing again. It was a beautiful experience, and I’d love to see those crazy monks again, but I don’t think it was really happening. Is this sort of stuff interesting or do you feel embarrassed for me? My wife thinks I may have mental health issues and that I should talk to someone. I can keep it professional, if you like, in these footnotes – just politics and comedy theory, yes? It’s just I’ve not been terribly wel
l this year, and if I don’t get some of these stories down, well, who will remember them? Does it even matter? We are all just dust in the wind.

  5 Trump actually gave the Pope a set of books by Martin Luther King.

  6 Melania Trump and the Pope had some kind of small-talk exchange. No one is sure exactly what was said, but at one point she was heard to have replied, ‘Pizza.’

  7 At his campaign headquarters in Montana, in May 2017, Republican candidate Greg Gianforte grabbed Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs by the neck, body-slammed him to the ground and hit him.

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

  4 June 20171

  Wake up and smell the covfefe and tell the spinning corpse of Robin Day the news.2 The old politics is over. This election is no longer a choice between left and right, between traditional working-class or middle-class allegiances, between self-interest and concern for others. It is a new kind of choice. It is a choice between bastards and twats.

  It was half-term, and like Theresa May, I began the week appearing before prearranged crowds of people who loved me, the throngs applauding my arrival and clapping at everything I said. Then, after leaving the Wells Comedy Festival, I crossed the nation honouring familial obligations and projecting my own electoral anxieties onto obliging British landscapes. Who knew that the gaping gash of Clutter’s Cave in the Malvern Hills, when viewed from the footpath, looks exactly like the prime minister’s open mouth?

  On Monday, I made my annual visit to the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling competition in Gloucestershire. The uninsurable million-year-old-produce-pursuing event sees heroic drunks leap suicidally down a 2:1 slope to chase a 9 lb wheel of Double Gloucester, which they have no chance of ever catching. Foreign observers need look no further to understand the peculiarly British mentality that drove us as a nation to embrace the vertical cliff of Brexit, our nostalgic visions as elusive as a speeding cheesy wheel.

  The cheese-rolling over, I arrived in Gloucester (Leave) and sat down to watch the evening’s bastard/twat face-off on Channel 4. But even the biggest bastard, even the most feckless twat, I decided, deserved better than to be interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, an embarrassing and punch-drunk old prize-fighter now, decades past his best, fit only for satirical election-night specials, keen to land one killer blow to prove he once had it, before soiling his concealed Conservative Party Y-fronts in public and stepping down to endorse aftershave or a range of fat-reducing grills. He could have been a contender.

  I went into Gloucester to buy a pork roll from a van and carry out a mobility-scooter census, but when I came back, Paxman was still snarling and growling, like a senile attack dog who had mistaken his own flaccid penis for a dangerous snake.3 ‘Mr Corbyn, if you were asked to shoot a fluffy kitten through the head with a bolt gun, could you do it? Could you do it? Could you? Answer the question!’ ‘I could do it, Jeremy, but I would have to be fully aware, from the intelligence agencies, of the facts that supported the cat’s supposed guilt first,’ answered an unflappable Corbyn. ‘What if the fluffy kitten had a ribbon tied in its hair and a tinkling bell, Mr Corbyn? Could you shoot it then? What if its name was Twinkle? Answer me!!’4

  The debate seemed less like a news programme and more like an ancient, traditional, ritual humiliation, still played out to this day, of would-be mayors in the square of a Pyrenean commune. During her wobbly TV appearance, trembling Theresa’s jawbone began all but flapping loose of her skull on its right-hand hinge. If May were a gunfighter in an Italian western, this familiar phenomenon would be the ‘tell’ that revealed her cracking under pressure, and Sergio Leone would zoom in on ever tighter closeups of her gradually dislocating mandible.

  The southern regions of May’s visage now seem to be held in place only by skin and saliva and fear. I wonder if she didn’t attend Wednesday’s debate because part of her face had actually worked loose. On Monday, it seemed almost inhumane of the Conservatives to expect her to continue to front out a shoddy manifesto she clearly found quite literally jaw-dropping in its inadequacy.

  On Tuesday evening, in Worcester (Leave), in the company of elderly relatives, I watched the artist Grayson Perry on Channel 4 fashioning two healing pots, depicting Leavers and Remainers respectively. My family are not Perry’s natural fanbase, but they were nonetheless delighted by him, though they thought his twin sister in the dress was strange.

  It seemed that Perry had used a glazed image of my face as the sort of thing trendy Remainers like.5 Luckily, no one in my family noticed, as they would have been utterly baffled by how a man they regard as having wasted his educational opportunities to become a kind of travelling Gypsy-clown could have possibly symbolised anything other than failure and tragedy.

  Perry’s pots aimed to show that we have more in common than that which divides us. I would have put Peter Stringfellow in a thong on the Remain pot and Nick Griffin’s funny eye on the Leave one, but I am not an artist. At the end of the show, Perry united the two different groups of white people depicted on his ceramics, and they all cried and hugged like a bunch of dicks. If I had been there, I would have kept the angry flame of despair burning and called all the Leavers arseholes to their stupid Leave faces. Not only have they ruined the future, but they also get a lovely pot commemorating their stupidity, made by a top artist. Where is the justice in that?

  On Wednesday, I drove back to London (Remain) across the Cotswolds at dusk, listening to the leaders’ debate on the radio. The children couldn’t believe it – loads of supposedly responsible adults just shouting over each other and screaming. It was just like being at home.6 Corbyn stayed calm, and I found myself pitying Amber Rudd, press-ganged to defend the indefensible, to audible audience laughter.

  We stopped at the Bronze Age Rollright Stones to eat pizza, bananas and home-made cake. Don’t you wish I was your dad? The sun was sinking over the horizon as we made our usual votive offerings of lavender and brown pennies.7 Some dreadlocked young people, sitting in a ring, were smoking and drinking and setting the world to rights. I remembered being their age, here in this exact same place, in a summer twilight thirty years ago,8 and doing the same, blissfully unaware of just how bad things were going to get.

  Given the vast areas of humour that are off-limits for someone PC, Lee does quite well. LePharaon

  Christ – this shit doesn’t work as satire, doesn’t work as humour, doesn’t work as political commentary. Just anaemic bile. Pete CW

  Nothing like those cutting edge references; Peter Stringfellow, Nick Griffin. What about Chas and Dave and Bullseye? Glad you’ve got this covered Stewart. Arriestotle

  Foul and nauseating prejudice for haters. I’ll be surprised if you are not ashamed of this article within a decade. Mustapha Mondeo

  What a pile of poo. Ive read it twice now and it got worse. Lanhar

  Brexit has brought a revelation of the pompous, sneering attitudes of Remainers. It makes their pain a guilty pleasure for the rest of us. Freddy Starmer

  It pretends to offer insight and analysis while being just another string of cowardly attacks on easy targets who aren’t allowed to fight back with the same weapons. Stringvestor

  Got anything else to talk about other than brexit? Youcantalk

  Even Brexit has it’s up side. Given you now mention it most of your columns, there’s been at least 20 minutes in it for you. Paul Lambert

  From the Cotswolds to London. Could there be a more middle class journey in the world … The Talentless Mr Exile

  1 This column was uncommonly personal and revealing in a way I didn’t intend it to be. There is no overarching comedy concept, no satirical through line. The insults to Leavers are largely witless. It’s just me travelling listlessly around south-west England feeling depressed about politics and resentful of people who I feel have sabotaged the country, and as such it is probably the most accurate representation in this book of my actual state of mind over these last three years.

  2 On 31 May, shortly after midni
ght, Donald Trump sent a tweet saying only, ‘Despite the constant negative press covfefe.’

  3 Gloucester had both pork-roll vans and mobility scooters in abundance.

  4 During the election campaign, Corbyn’s accusers became fixated on whether or not he would be prepared to press the big red nuclear-war button, a possibility Theresa May had embraced with disturbing enthusiasm.

  5 We saw this pot in situ at the Serpentine Gallery. I moved through the crowd, just like a normal person who wasn’t on some top Art, and I didn’t point it out to the kids – I didn’t want any fuss from bystanders. ‘Is that you?’ my six-year-old said, finding my face for herself, unbidden. ‘Yes,’ I said. She didn’t know enough about the world to know that it was weird for your dad to be on an exhibited Art pot, and moved off, suitably unimpressed by the subject of Perry’s daub.

  6 Ka-boom!

  7 I always do this at ancient sacred sites, but I don’t have any kind of belief system. Like Dylan said, you gotta serve somebody!

  8 We’d get the bus from Oxford to Chipping Norton and walk the last three miles down lanes lined with hedgerows, alive with insects and birds, buzzing and fecund in a way that our children will never experience, as the world dies around them. Back then, an old lady owned the site, and she sat in a wooden cabin collecting money for a cat charity. I still plot my course around the country via prehistoric sites, if I can. It gives otherwise meaningless processes an imaginary sense of purpose. I read a book called Mysterious Britain, by Janet and Colin Bord, when I was eleven or so, and it set me on the path. The weekend before my final exams at university, my friend Doug and I slept in sleeping bags at Wayland’s Smithy, a burial chamber on the Ridgeway, before such places were so rigorously policed, to clear our mental pipes. On the actual day of my fiftieth, I was in the Maes Howe tomb, shining water on all sides, in a suddenly sun-drenched and cobalt-blue Orkney, weeping over runes, and it was the best birthday I ever had. But I walked with Robert Lloyd, lead singer of ’80s Birmingham post-punk band The Nightingales, to a snow-dusted Mitchell’s Fold stone circle, on the border of Wales and Shropshire, last month, and he clearly found the whole process pointless.