The Tories’ Santa tax has brought Christmas to its knees - December 2022 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - December 18th, 2022

It seems there is no depth to which the current crop of Conservatives will not sink, monetising every aspect of modern life in an attempt to create backdoor pathways to funnel any available wealth into their own pockets and those of their donors and cronies, the rivers and seas fouled with excrement, the bodies piled…

The Tories are trashing more than just the nation - October 2022 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 30th, 2022

I opened my new standup show, Basic Lee, 14 days after Liz Truss took office. Do you remember her? The cheese one? I joked to the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati in attendance at the Leicester Square theatre that there was little point in pursuing my usual practice of tying a personal story into the contemporary political…

Rise up, twitchers! The thinktanks are coming - October 2022 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - October 2nd, 2022

Perhaps the unelected 2022 Conservative government’s most surprising achievement has been to radicalise the the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Flask-swiggers best known for shivering silently in freezing hides, usually they await the seasonal arrival of a particular kind of swan. But Kwasi Kwarteng’s kamikwasi budget has made landscape and wildlife collateral damage…

Liz Truss and her team are taking us for a ride - September 2022 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 25th, 2022

My newly opened standup show, Basic Lee, has to hold together until its final dates in the spring of 2024, so is it worth me even writing any material about the Liz Truss government? Having moved beyond the safe space of Conservative party leadership hustings, it seems Truss will dissolve on contact with air, combusting…

The BBC axing my show was in very poor taste - September 2022 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 18th, 2022

Despite wearing a supportive EU blue-and-gold hat to the first post-referendum parliament, the Queen’s genius was that she remained a mystery, a blank canvas the whole nation could project its hopes and dreams on to. Personally, I loved the Queen. She hung on long enough to accept, definitively, the resignation of Boris Johnson, who lied…

Pity poor Britons playing Liz Truss’s lottery - September 2022 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 11th, 2022

Last week, on ITV’s This Morning, the cheerily rodentine Phillip Schofield and his margarine-moulded familiar, Holly Willoughby, offered a desperate member of the public the chance to have their energy bills paid at the whim of a gaudy spinning wheel of chance. Schofield is a cruel god, for whom we are mere flies, our sufferings…