Touched by the hand of Ithell: my fascination with a forgotten surrealist - October 2021 The Guardian - By Stewart Lee - October 11th, 2021

I am a travelling entertainer. I spent decades in secondhand bookshops in shabby sidestreets, filling the sick-stomach void between station and show with palliative possibility, panning for gold. Somewhere at the end of the last millennium, a few measly pounds bought me a signed first edition of the Irish travelogue The Crying of the Wind…

You’ll be sorry when Gove puts the moves on No 10 - September 2021 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 5th, 2021

“Dance, dance, wherever you may be! I’m the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Surrey Heath’s MP, And that’s why I get into clubs for free.” The Gove of the Dance, Sydney Carter, 1963 Few people will ever forget where they were when they learned that Michael Gove had been filmed dancing alone in…

Andrew Neil enters his broom-cupboard years… - August 2021 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 29th, 2021

A woman I went on a blind date with in 1988 told me that witches she knew would consort with the devil at midnight, on the meadow by the river outside the town where I was a student. Soon after I decided to become a standup comedian, I sought them out, in the shadow of…

Tory values? Urination, urination, urination - August 2021 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 8th, 2021

Did the Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen cultivate lagoons of urine in his rural Leicestershire constituency? In 2014, the Environment Agency claimed lagoons at the Measham depot of his vegetable packaging and distribution company, AB Produce, emitted a pervasive urine smell. “It smells just like urine all the time – first thing in the morning until…

Turns out Boris Johnson’s crime strategy was just another pile of mud - August 2021 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 1st, 2021

Earlier this week a pile of mud was dumped at the west end of Oxford Street. Then some squares of grass were stuck on the mud. Then people were charged £8 to go up it. Visitor Emma Wright tweeted that going up the mud was “the worst thing I have ever done in London”. But…

Did I cock up over the Marcus Rashford mural? - July 2021 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 25th, 2021

On Wednesday of the week before last I filed one of my supposedly funny “columns” for last Sunday’s Observer. I wanted to write a personal pastiche of feel-good op-eds about England’s near victory in the Euros and reference how Boris Johnson government’s calculated culture war tried to draw the squad into its sights, as surely…