I wouldn’t have an OBE unless they gave me one - January 2016 The Observer - January 10th, 2016

For the public good: Sir Lynton Crosby in Downing Street. Photograph: Steve Back/Rex The New Year knighting of David Cameron’s election strategist Lynton Crosby was the most obscene misuse of Conservative power since George Osborne, unable to locate his satchel, used a friend’s chained gimp as a human pencil sharpener. If the opposition were not…

Out of the mouths of babes, real religious truth - January 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 3rd, 2016

Nicky Morgan believes that children should be taught that the UK is ‘in the main’ a Christian country. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA On 28 December I performed my annual progress around a Midlands motorway triangle, through sluggish bank holiday traffic, to venerate relatives’ graves. My eight-year-old daughter accompanied me, leavening my loneliness, and I made the…

The best gig I ever saw: Stewart Lee on the Fall, Cornwall, 1984 - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 15th, 2015

It was the summer of 1984. I was 16. I wanted, finally, to see the Fall. I’d been fixated on the group since a 1981 Peel session suddenly flipped somehow from irritating me beyond reason to enthralling me beyond imagination. Provocative repetition. Monotonous drones. Withering sarcasm. I’m lucky I was struck by something so utterly…

Sun slams Corbyn’s nod and gets a rise out of me - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 15th, 2015

Last week’s newspaper attacks on Jeremy Corbyn have moved from the dishonest into the deranged. On page seven of Monday’s Telegraph, Sir Gerald Howarth MP, who once worried that the same sex marriage bill would be seen by “the aggressive homosexual community… as but a stepping stone to something even further”, analysed Corbyn’s Remembrance service…

A pyre of burning hate in a pagan, polluted England - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 8th, 2015

Have you ever looked into the eyes of a hedgehog and known that it wanted to die? I have. But wait, I am getting ahead of myself. On Halloween, as we headed west in our Volkswagen Passat, I realised the most horrifying thing in the vicinity was our own family estate. With our car belching…

My name is Stewart Lee, and I’m an AAlcoholic - November 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - November 1st, 2015

Stewart Lee’s new memoir, AAlcoholic AAnonymous, is an honest, searingly brutal saga of a privileged and educated man in the midst of a relatively short-lived and ultimately self-induced torpor, who repays the world for his undeserved second chance at life with nothing but scorn and contempt. In this extract he writes – for the first…