Look at the Tories – scotch egg all over their faces - December 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - December 6th, 2020

On Wednesday morning, on Times Radio, the terminally bewildered health secretary, Matt Handcock, claimed unchallenged that our imminent departure from the EU meant the Covid vaccine had been approved more quickly. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency quickly clarified we had completed the process using existing provisions of EU law. If the Brexit-Covid government…

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…

What’s the story with Britpop and Covid denial? - September 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 20th, 2020

On Monday, the Oasis pop star Noel Gallagher announced his suspicion of masks: “If I get the virus it’s on me, it’s not on anyone else… it’s a piss-take,” declared the People’s Virologist. “There’s no need for it… They’re pointless.” The previous week, in a punctuation-resistant statement Auto-Tuned into near coherence, former Stone Roses singer…

Never mind Extinction Rebellion, let’s consider Boris Johnson’s charge sheet - September 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 13th, 2020

My old university friend, the American geographer William Dyer, accepted my Skype call at a research station on the pebble shores of the Antarctic Sound. Once, it would have been too remote to receive messages and yet here I was, laughing at the Sub Pop Records baseball cap that fixed him temporally and culturally. Will…

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…