My newly opened standup show, Basic Lee, has to hold together until its final dates in the spring of 2024, so is it worth me even writing any material about the Liz Truss government? Having moved beyond the safe space of Conservative party leadership hustings, it seems Truss will dissolve on contact with air, combusting in a burning flame of Brexit reality. Trying to write durable standup material about the Truss government makes about as much sense as trying to befriend a mayfly or marry a disposable barbecue.
Consider this for a cabinet. We have Jacob Rees-Mogg, an energy minister who believes humanity “should adapt to climate change”. Perhaps by learning to drink fire. And eating despair. Tree-Frog is currently trying to loosen the definition of exactly what constitutes an earthquake, so as to enable further fatal fossil fuel exploitation in the form of fracking. Fair play. Dehydration of clay soils where I live, caused by fossil fuel-exacerbated climate change, means all my British Comedy Awards fall off the display ziggurat every time a mildly overweight man in a Sinclair C5 goes past the house. But Tree-Frog says something is only officially an earthquake now if the Mole Man from Fantastic Four ™ ® issue 1 (1961) has emerged from a great fissure in the street with his mole-human hybrids the Moloids seeking to subjugate the surface world.
Kwasi Kwarteng is the new chancellor of the exchequer and his first response to the cost of living crisis was to lift the EU cap on bankers’ bonuses. All across the City of London, cocaine dealers and the pimps of high-class sex workers breathed a collective sigh of relief. They won’t be going hungry this Christmas! God bless you, Mr Kwarteng, sir! Anything we can do for you, anything. Charlie Mr Kwarteng Sir? Golden showers? Pegging? Pegging, Mr Kwarteng? Perhaps that’s what Kwarteng was giggling about during the Queen’s funeral, much to the disgust of his neighbour, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, whose disgust threshold is high, especially regarding her own policies. Either that or Kwarteng had his phone out and was watching an especially funny Ricky Gervais routine about a man identifying as a blah blah blah blah blah.
Nadhim Zahawi is the new equalities minister and once charged the taxpayer to heat the stables of his horses. Zahawi’s horses are more equal than your frozen gran. But why shouldn’t Zahawi’s horses be warm? Nothing speaks of inequality more than a chilly horse. Zahawi’s horses are warm. But when will all the horses be warm? What do we want? Warm horses. When do we want them? Now. It’s bad news that Gran froze to death, yes, and it’s a shame she wasn’t one of Zahawi’s horses. Admittedly, she would have had to allow him to ride her. But doubtless our grans have done worse things. How do you think they got all those nylon stockings during the war?
There is a new environment secretary called Ranil Malcolm Jayawardena, a previously unknown politician who has been given a doomed and impossible job and is the political equivalent of the bit-part extra sent down to the planet with Kirk, Spock and Bones in Star Trek, who we know will soon be eaten by a sentient rock. Jayawardena has already promised to stop the water companies dumping millions of gallons of human excrement into the sea, which will be hard for him as his own government voted to allow it; and which the water companies do because they can’t get the purification chemicals from Europe any more, because 52% of the country voted to leave the single market, the same 52% of the country that voted to get rid of EU pollution regulations. And we must respect the Brexit referendum. So good luck with that, Ranil Malcolm Jayawardena. You are the patsy and one day you will be charging £2 for a signed photo at Tory fan conventions! Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Despite building her campaign on the easily disprovable notion that Brexit was a good idea, Truss has immediately splatted into the reinforced windshield of its impossible reality, like a fly in a small hat. Truss simply isn’t as good at lying as blustery Boris Johnson, a hot man tucking in his shirt as he exits a befouled service station toilet cubicle without even apologising for the terrible state he has left it in to the next in line, on this occasion the entire population of Britain. Of course there won’t be an American trade deal, Truss admitted. The pageantry of the last week has evaporated and we have to appreciate that, whatever the Tory press says, the rest of the free world think we are dicks.
In 2016, Barack Obama warned us that the UK would be at the back of the queue for American trade deals post-Brexit, a situation worsened now by the contempt in which the Conservatives hold the Good Friday agreement that means so much to America’s romantic Irish diaspora. Nigel Farage subsequently dismissed Obama’s comments, calling him “a loathsome creature” and Brexiters took to their tiny plastic trumpets to herald the American trade deals we would soon enjoy. But Brexiters were half right. We’re not at the back of the queue. But that’s because we aren’t even in the queue at all. We aren’t even in the queue to be let into the room where you queue up to join the queue. Which is a shame because, as we saw last weekend in London, queuing is one of the things we Britons do well. And that’s lucky, because Brexit means we’re going to have to get used to doing a lot of queuing.
Stewart Lee’s Snowflake is currently available on the BBC iPlayer, but the scheduled terrestrial repeat is cancelled. The delayed Tornado will be on BBC Two 29 September at 11.15pm, and then on the iPlayer. Basic Lee tour dates are at stewartlee.co.uk/live-dates
