Defy John Whittingdale and a dominatrix will whip you into line - April 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 24th, 2016

Today, if I worked as a cartoonist for a tabloid newspaper, I could simply hand in a hurried scrawl of heaven, where Victoria Wood now plays the piano alongside Prince on guitar and John Whittingdale’s political credibility on slap bass. But instead, I must write. Does it matter that the torture-porn fan, free-market fundamentalist and…

Curating… you are the disease, I am the curator - March 2016 The Observer - March 27th, 2016

The television food personality and chef Angela Hartnett, formerly best remembered as the Rod Hull to Gordon Ramsay’s Emu, is curating something called Kitchen Tales at the Chipping Norton Set’s cheese and music festival, Wilderness. But I can’t work out from the blurb if it is an exhibition, an event, a shop, or just some…

Jeremy Hunt is an ethical columnist’s nightmare - February 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 14th, 2016

Junior doctors demonstrate outside the department of health on 11 February. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images It is not always easy to do the right thing. In the 80s, for example, I remember when we all tried to avoid buying apartheid-era South African fruit. “Are these apples from South Africa?”, a photographer friend asked a cockney…

Who will write the front page this nation needs? - February 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 7th, 2016

On Wednesday night the infinite number of monkeys that usually write the editorial for the Daily Mail had fallen victim en masse to the zika virus. And so, having made something of a name for myself in Fleet Street, having filled in for David Mitchell here these past few months, I was called in at…

Osborne’s tax deals are the stuff of spaghetti westerns - January 2016 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - January 31st, 2016

My usual methods of decoding experience – art, literature and old punk rock records – have been rendered irrelevant by the sheer unscrupulousness of our public figures. We are in a post-Thick of It world, where the fictional PR attack dog Malcolm Tucker seems, compared with those schooled by Lynton Crosby OBE, dancing in Dionysiac…

In need of an affordable home? Turn left at Pluto - January 2016 The Observer - January 24th, 2016

A new Neptune-sized planet has been discovered, lurking beyond Pluto, after a prolonged study of unexplained orbital patterns. This method of detection has a precedent. As long ago as 1846, the French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier wrote to the physicist François Arago, saying “Sir! Surely you can see there must be a ninth planet, if…