Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid just needed Trump - April 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 13th, 2025

I first saw the Danish Dogme 95 film Festen in 1998 when I was 30. You had to go to the cinema to see films in those days, when small boys ran barefoot on a conveyor belt to turn the reels, and it’s possible I watched its depiction of a family torn apart by violence,…

Orange Juice? Keir Starmer is on the Kool-Aid - April 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 6th, 2025

On 1 April, the TV comedian John Richardsons, who you will have seen on many panel shows, announced he was becoming a teacher, having already completed the training in secret. I was humbled by Richardsons’s decision to do something genuinely worthwhile and by his foolhardy bravery. How would he control a class of teenagers pre-armed…

I’ve got the message: security leaks are no laughing matter - March 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 30th, 2025

During the Brexit era, it became obvious many comments under these columns were being placed by Russian trolls, with slightly strange grasps of idiomatic English, cut-and-pasting blocks of approved pro-Putin and anti-EU texts to change the direction of the discourse. Their posts read like the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but trained on 90s…

FROM STEWART LEE April ’25 – As slippery as a greasy pig since 1968 - March 2025 March 27th, 2025

1. SAVE THE TOMB OF THE EAGLES One of my favorite places in the world is the neolithic Tomb of The Eagles on Orkney. Instead of making it easy for themselves and just reburying it, the farming family that owned the land it occupied tried to run it for the benefit of visitors, with young…

Trump chose the wrong hill to DEI on - March 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 23rd, 2025

In the second world war, Navajo code talkers transmitted sensitive US military information in their own undocumented language. Which was nice of them, as their immediate ancestors had been dispossessed and destroyed by white settlers, and then had all their water poisoned with uranium. “Were it not for the Navajos,” concluded major Howard Connor, at…

If you’re reading this column, Elon Musk has messed up - March 2025 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 16th, 2025

Wake up grandad and put your opinions in the pedal bin! If you even think you are well informed you are living a lie. What the world believes today depends on who is controlling legacy media’s last feeble news fronts, like the head-bobbing slaphead Jeff Bezos’s supine Washington Post, and on who programs digital social…