The racists won. So are they happy now? - April 2018 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 29th, 2018

I feel sorry for Theresa May. And that Rudd one, who looks like she is wearing a rubber Halloween mask based on her own face. What if, because you were all going on about how great Ukip were, and how Nigel Farage was only saying what people had been thinking all along, and all these…

Stay focused Brexiters – Russia is not the enemy - March 2018 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 18th, 2018

Last Sunday, diners from the Salisbury Zizzi were belatedly advised to burn all their clothes as a precautionary measure; as was anyone who had ever visited a Jamie’s Italian, but for different reasons. Enemies of Putin expire and nuclear threats are proliferating across the Earth. Perhaps the trademark robust diplomacy of the foreign secretary Boris…

American Cornish pasties? Did King Arthur die for this? - March 2018 The Observer - March 11th, 2018

Say “Cornwall” to an uncontacted pygmy brave deep in a New Zealand forest and his bamboo flute will swiftly carve the shape of the Cornish pasty into the Shotover riverbank sands. “Oggy, oggy, oggy,” he will cry, as he mimes pushing a too-hot Cornish pasty into his unambiguously delighted face. “Oggy, oggy, oggy!” But last…

The Brexit culture wars are driving me bananas - March 2018 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - March 4th, 2018

On 10 May 2016, in the closing days of the Brexit campaign, at an impromptu speech in Cornwall, lying Boris Johnson again invoked the Brexiters’ foundation myth that the EU sought to ban bendy bananas. But voters who backed leaving the EU in order to get back the bendy bananas, which had not been taken…

The Fall – The Case For The Last Two Decades - March 2018 Record Collector Issue 477 March '18 - By Stewart Lee - March 1st, 2018

After a messy on-stage altercation at New York’s Brownies club on April 7th 1998, Smith parted company with his then band, including bass-player Steve Hanley, a cornerstone of The Fall’s initial two decade run who, between 1987 to 1993, had helped wrestle The Fall into the Top Fifty. Obituary wisdom has it that the twenty…

Is a sci-fi-style dystopia such a bad Brexit outcome? - February 2018 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 25th, 2018

For nearly 18 months now, the increasingly frustrated European liberal fat-cat elite has been asking for some clues as to what we brave British Brexiters imagine Brexit will be, the pastry edifice of Theresa May’s monumental “Brexit means Brexit” statement having already crumbled last year, when a moth’s tear fell near it. Unable to say…