JAMES Watt once sold bottles of 55% beer stuffed inside dead squirrels for between £500 and £700. The Brewdog founder knows a waste of money when he sees one.
He has now announced a new venture, Shadow Doge. It’s billed as the “unofficial, underground cousin” of Elon Musk’s Department for Government Efficiency (Doge).
Musk has christened the new department with a reference to a meme featuring a picture of a Shiba Inu who would characteristically have his interior monologue written on top of the picture in cutesy broken English. Refined stuff.
Brewdog became popular around the same time as Musk’s beloved Doge meme, pitching themselves in cringe-inducing fashion as rebellious “punks” sticking it to the man.
Their signature beer Punk IPA has an alcohol-free version called Punk AF, they did a version for International Women’s Day called Beer For Girls. With all the subtlety of a right hook to the jaw, Watt (below) told us over and over again: “We’re not just punks with a purpose, we’re also punks with patter.”
Musk has cultivated a similarly “zany” public image. When he bought Twitter and renamed it X, he posted a video of him carrying a sink into the company’s headquarters the caption: “Let that sink in.”
A company he founded to bore tunnels in the ground was, inevitably, called The Boring Company.
Both men conduct themselves with a forced wacky edginess that somehow always makes you feel like they’re elbowing you in the ribs, grinning idiotically and asking: “Geddit?”
Their similarities run deeper than both possessing the pathetic air of being David Brent for the AI generation.
Their politics and beliefs – despite apparent fluctuations over the years – appear to have landed them in remarkably similar camps.
Both are now obsessed with cutting “wasteful” public spending. For Musk, this has involved getting his goons to run around the Capitol to physically invade government departments to shut them down, most notably USaid.
Watt’s more low-key approach has so far involved setting up a website – with eyeball-searingly bad AI-generated branding – to provide “whistleblowers” with a line to report Whitehall waste.
It joins other “humorous” bids to monitor wasteful Westminster spending, not limited to The Spectator’s Project Against Frivolous Funding (Spaff, geddit) and the Charlotte Gill scheme “Doge UK”. They are currently at war over who had the idea first.
Less colourful is the actual Government’s bid to trim the fat, with Rachel Reeves (below) pledging to find 5% “efficiency savings” in departmental budgets.
This all smacks of a lingering obsession with “balancing the books”, with Watt claiming that skimming 10% off of Government spending could help Britain “build the strongest economy in the world”.
When they started off, Musk and Watt both cut figures fairly typical of the late neoliberal era.
Musk voted for Barack Obama in the past, while in 2014 Brewdog took a shot at the Russian president’s homophobic policies with a beer – “not for gays” – called Hello My Name is Vladimir.
And when Musk announced in May 2022 he would be voting Republican he took pains to show how he was above petty party politics, saying he “would classify myself as a moderate, neither Republican or Democrat”. Less than three years later, he would throw a Nazi salute at Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Watt, in his explanation of Shadow Doge, also says “this isn’t about party politics”. He’s just a reasonable guy, he’s “agnostic”, he doesn’t believe in labels, man.
He joins a growing list of men who like to present their vibey, “anti-establishment” politics as superior to ideology. They just see through the Matrix.
For this, you could look to millionaire Jeremy Clarkson (below), whose everyman schtick means that people somehow believe his opposition to Labour’s inheritance tax on family farms is about preserving the rural way of life – not that his tax dodging scheme has been ruined.
Or barrow boy influencer Thomas Skinner, who this week posed for a photo outside Parliament with Reform MP Rupert Lowe.
Skinner, who made his name as a contestant on The Apprentice, frequently fires off tweets to his 315,000 Twitter/X which are a head-spinning mix of folksy common-sense wisdom, paeans to good old-fashioned British values and salt-of-the-earth expressions of distrust in the media and the government.
This group might seem disparate – and undoubtedly they’d find much to argue about over a few bottles of Punk IPA if given the chance – but they all share a keen sense for what’s hot and what’s not.
It’d be too cynical by half to say they are merely chasing the money through carefully crafted personas designed to appeal to the left-behind everyman.
Think of them as the canary in the coalmine. If this is where the zeitgeist is at right now, then we might see a future Lord Watt taking a job in a future Reform UK government.
