Migrants and my own modest proposal - November 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 1st, 2020

In August, a television producer asked me to contribute to a forthcoming documentary about the 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift. Swift is best known for writing the children’s story Gulliver’s Travels, which is about a man who keeps going all different sizes and riding around on mice. Swift failed to use the then fashionable travelogue format…

Since we’re talking fantasy Brexit deals… - October 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 25th, 2020

In 1981, tarnished by a legacy of nuclear embarrassments, the leaky Cumbrian atomic power plant Windscale was rebranded as Sellafield and the problems of public perception simply melted away, like hot uranium seeping into a water table. Likewise, we are no longer about to embrace a similarly contaminated no-deal Brexit. We are instead welcoming a…

The divided land of ‘woke’ and Tory - September 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 6th, 2020

Writing last weekend on the scandal surrounding the Proms’ absence of patriotic songs, the former minister of fun David Mellors opined, “the person I feel most sorry for is Edward Elgar”, the composer of Land of Hope and Glory. Not black Britons offended by Rule, Britannia!’s references to slaves; not black Britons annoyed by people…

I’ll tell you what’s got us choking on our granola… - August 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 30th, 2020

The nation will fall. The monarchy will collapse. The ravens are leaving the Tower of London. They flee not in anticipation of another Landrover-crash Prince Andrew interview, but because they are bored by virus London’s lack of bustle. I understand. Without live music, live comedy, and live yoghurt, London is the congested, polluted, overpriced hell-hole…

Come summer 2021, who’s going to save our sorry asses? - August 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 9th, 2020

Two dozen young people, their hair unkempt, their face masks filthy, stood on the rolling route of the Ridgeway at Overton, holding aloft on wooden shafts an enormous pair of billowing ladies’ bloomers. White against the blue sky like nylon clouds, written upon their wind-filled cheeks were the words “sorry ass”. “Sorry ass!”, chanted the…

The Brexit government is lost in a fog of lies - August 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 2nd, 2020

Michael Gove is standing in a public waste disposal site in west London, objective reality dissolving around him, surrounded by a semicircle of imaginary attendants he has made himself from discarded rubbish; mop-handle spines, coathanger arms, sofa cushion bodies, and rotting rubber football heads. “These are my attendants, Leapy Lee,” he cried up at me,…