Rishi Sunak – a total investment banker - August 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 6th, 2023

I view human nature through the Techniscope ™® lens of 1960s Italian cowboy films. In Spaghetti Western World, the men we most despise are those who, when the chips are down, snatch an innocent peasant child and put a pistol to their temple, to use as a human shield until their demands are met. Our…

Europe burns while the Tories’ net zero plans are set to go up in smoke - July 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 30th, 2023

It’s 2am on Thursday. Wildfires are burning in Greece, Italy, Tunisia, Portugal, Croatia and Algeria. British tourist climate refugees are, ironically, being rescued by friendly locals in small boats. Stop the boats! No! Not those boats! The other ones! The ones with brown people in them! But the main environmental news in the past few…

If the Tory degree plan is dopey, look who’s selling it - July 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 23rd, 2023

On Monday, as part of their ongoing fabricated culture war, a desperate Conservative government declared an incoherent assault on “rip-off” degrees. But there is no one left in the duffer-stuffed Conservative government clever enough to defend the idiotic soundbite that is “Crackdown on Mickey Mouse degrees!” And hasn’t Mickey Mouse suffered enough, being painted over…

The UK’s Mickey Mouse news agenda deserves only contempt - July 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 16th, 2023

It’s Thursday morning. Boris Johnson, who made a former KGB agent’s son a lord and attended sexy parties at his fairytale hacienda, has failed to hand over his mobile phone to the Covid inquiry as some secret spies said there might be all stuff on it. Johnson has also spaffed out another child, this time…

Bard jokes: how music-hall greats inspired Stewart Lee to meddle with Macbeth - July 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 8th, 2023

Shakedowns of Shakespeare scramble the settings. Here’s Romeo and Juliet as cokehead Californians, King Lear as a cattle baron, and Titus Andronicus as an ombudsman. But the text remains sacrosanct – Emma Rice’s nibbling at the pentameters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream irking Globe purists as recently as 2016. So I was surprised when, at…

Never mind the fate of life on Earth, what about the cat-children? - July 2023 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 2nd, 2023

At my secondary school, a friend of mine pretended to be the confidant of the tragic Scottish child star Lena Zavaroni, maintaining that time away on family holidays was actually spent visiting the ailing singer at her home in Scotland. He even went as far as appearing to receive and engage in phone calls from…