Like all supervillains, the Tories will meet their match - January 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 21st, 2024

On Wednesday, the former environment secretary Thérèse Coffey, on whose watch the deregulated post-Brexit waterways of Britain turned into rivers of human excrement, with only Feargal Sharkey to speak for them, tried to score a sarcastic point off Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary. Cooper “can’t even get the name of the country right, talking…

What next for woke ITV after the Post Office drama? Danny Dyer v the sewage scandal? - January 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 14th, 2024

What is the point of the arts? Last week, it appeared it is to create accessible mainstream drama that highlights and threatens to actually resolve an injustice that the government ignored, while at the same time increasing advertising revenue for a commercial broadcaster because of massive viewing figures – a double win for both big…

Where did all the government’s wine go? Expect another vintage Tory evasion - January 2024 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 7th, 2024

A government wine cellar provides “guests of the government, from home and overseas, with wines of appropriate quality at reasonable cost”. Perhaps some of Boris Johnson’s children are kept down there too. We never seem to see many of them. And what happened to Dilyn the dog? We know Johnson was easily bored of new…

My plan to topple the Tory dark lords in 2024 - December 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - December 31st, 2023

Happy new year! But is it too late to save British democracy as we once knew it? In 2024, details of your awkward rectal prolapse could soon be earning a pretty penny for shareholders of an American surveillance business. What a time to be alive! The American spy technology company Palantir has been given a…

The Bleak Midwinter Messages: a Conservative ghost story for Christmas - December 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - December 24th, 2023

“Gentlemen,” began the Baron to his two companions, faces flickering in the guttering coals, “I beg your indulgence on a very peculiar matter, and I would ask you not to mock me, nor worse, to think me quite mad, until you have considered fully the whole of my sorry tale. For if what I am…

Sunak has supersized his lies, from WhatsApps to Rwanda - December 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - December 17th, 2023

It’s a privilege to write funny columns about the news for the Observer, and every Sunday I wake excitedly to see what flows from the slushy pen of our illustrator, David Foldvari. But writing these means I have to read the news every day, a weather eye on the endemic corruption of untouchable ministers, and…