The satirical artists’ collective Led By Donkeys says the Labour government is “fair game” and it is inconceivable that the group will not hold it accountable over the next few years.
“We’re not starry-eyed about Labour,” said Ben Stewart, one of the group’s founder members, after it made headlines this week when it targeted Liz Truss.
Truss was in the middle of voicing her support for Donald Trump’s campaign to regain the White House in November when a remote-controlled banner was lowered behind the former Conservative prime minister at an event in Suffolk. It featured a giant lettuce and the words: “I crashed the economy.”
Truss said: “That’s not funny,” and walked off the stage. She later issued a statement on X saying Led By Donkeys were “far-left activists” who used the stunt as a means to “intimidate people and suppress free speech”. She added: “I won’t stand for it.”
Stewart, one of the four men who created Led By Donkeys, activated the banner from his seat in the audience but declined to explain how the group pulled off the stunt, other than to say they had no inside help.
“It presented something of a challenge, but I can’t tell you how we did it,” Stewart said.
He consciously chose the moment when Truss was “aligning herself with the far right in America” to lower the banner.
Her reaction was “entirely predictable”, he said. “It was absolutely on brand. We were discussing it beforehand, and we said she’s going to say ‘that is not funny’ and walk off stage. It was almost like she was working off a script. It’s just a script that we’ve all come to know.”
The group had pulled off a similar stunt with Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, during the general election campaign in June. That banner featured an image of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, with the words “I ♡ Nigel.”
Stewart said: “Farage is better at thinking on his feet. He tried to style it out, and did a reasonably good job for about 30 seconds – and then his temper surfaced. He essentially revealed something interesting about himself, because he said: ‘Whoever conspired with the venue to do this, we’re going to get them sacked.’”
Led By Donkeys was formed after the Brexit referendum in response to the “lies, lunacy and hypocrisy” of the leave campaign. “It felt like the country had reached another level of chaos,” Stewart later said in an interview.
The group started by flyposting over billboards and posting its work on social media. Within weeks, it had raised hundreds of thousands of pounds from donations, and became more ambitious in its messaging.
Over the next few years, the chaos deepened, providing satirists with rich material. Now Led By Donkeys is facing a new political landscape after Labour’s landslide victory in the general election. All its work is funded by the public.
“We’re not thinking we’re going to live in a red rose utopia,” said Stewart. “We don’t yet know the contours of this government, we’re not sure how they’re going to govern. But there’s no doubt it will disappoint us in some, if not many, respects.
“Led By Donkeys is an accountability project so it’s inconceivable that we won’t turn our attention in a really direct way to what the government is doing. The project isn’t tribal.”
But the group also intends to keep a strong focus on the far right after the recent riots across the country. “We have a profound far-right danger in this country. What we saw was bordering on an attempted pogrom against British citizens,” said Stewart.
The group had been “deeply troubled by leading British political figures, who should know better” supporting the action on the streets. “And we’re looking at leading conservative figures who are supporting Trump,” Stewart added.
But that was not “in any way mutually exclusive to looking at what this Labour government is doing, and where they’re going, and what contribution we can make to holding them accountable”.
On occasion, when in the pub, the four founders of Led By Donkeys discussed who deserves the title of “donkey No 1”, said Stewart. “It sometimes changes, but there is one ever-present name: Nigel Farage.”
