Addressing the subject of Gaza on Tuesday, Sir Keir Starmer called for the “return of the sausages”, which was a surprise to those of us who didn’t know they were missing. Although, come to think of it, when was the last time you saw a big fat bulldog with a string of them in its mouth being chased down the high street by a butcher in a straw hat? And, when I was young in the 1970s, any drive to the West Country would see the car windscreen covered in splattered sausages, but these days its stays spotless. Make of that what you will.
I’m not thinking straight. I’ve got a virus that’s smothered my brain like psychedelic cement and I’m already a day late filing this. But at least I didn’t say “sausages” when I meant “hostages”. Starmer’s mistake was genuine though. When Boris Johnson talked, just once in June 2019, about his soon-forgotten passion for model buses, it was to game search algorithms away from those other buses, the ones he wrote massive Brexit lies on.
Watching sausage-gate live, I assumed Starmer wouldn’t find himself on the end of the antisemitism accusations levelled at those on the left of his now purged party’s last incarnation. No one could be that cynical. But it’s Wednesday morning now and on Twitter (currently X), Britain’s worst columnist, Allison Pearson, is in the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, with the headline “Starmer’s sausages gaff shows he doesn’t care about Israel”. She finally, really did it!!! You maniac!!!!
It’s not for me to hypothesise how Pearson might have got from Starmer stumbling over the word hostage to the conclusion that he doesn’t care about Israel. Maybe Pearson is right. The problem is as I sit here at 10.45am on Wednesday I’m not going to pay £1 to access the horrible Daily Telegraph’s website to read her thoughts in full. That would be immoral. So I am going to go over the road to Sainsbury’s to steal today’s print edition which, on balance, is the lesser of two evils. See you in a sec.
11.05am. I’m back now, purloined paper in hand. A simple switcheroo at the self-checkout and I have my own pristine copy of Britain’s worst newspaper all to myself without having contributed unforgivably to its circulation figures or finances. And I’d have been back sooner if I hadn’t gone up to the woke delicatessen to get some woke chestnuts to make the woke kids a woke mushroom Wellington for tea. It was the least amoral option. Jeremy Bentham would approve.
But as I skim through the horrible broadsheet looking for Pearson’s column, I become so overwhelmed by the unrelenting unpleasantness, dishonesty and stupidity of it – “When the last pub calls last orders it will be time to die”, “Cussin’ Kamala wants to trash talk her way to the White House”, “Christine Hamilton: My facelift has knocked 20 years off me” – that I don’t want it near me and throw it straight in the woke recycling bin unread, where it might at least do some good. By rotting.
It’s noon now. I suddenly feel really weak again, either because of the exertion of stealing the Daily Telegraph and buying those woke nuts, or because the Daily Telegraph made contact with my skin, or because of my cement head virus. So I’m going to sleep for a bit.
Aaaaah! Where am I? What year is this? Is King Charles still on the throne? Is brat still a thing? It’s 2.11pm now and I realised in my sleep that even though the Labour party are in government they are still in opposition – to the newspapers, to Laura Kuenssberg’s gelded BBC news-eunuchs, and to the Tufton Street thinktanks that broadcasters still allow to steer the news agenda. Liberal media should hold Starmer to account – on the environment, on the Middle East, and on his antisemitic fixation on sausages.
But rightwing media, or the media, as it is known, needs to apply the same forensic lines of questioning to the last government’s industrial-scale theft of public money, as Labour attempts to recover it. And it should pursue the Tory figureheads’ wholesale diversion of public funding to their own pockets that it neglected, before starting on about Keir Starmer’s football ground security requirements.
Of course Starmer can’t go on the terraces. In 2014 I bought tickets for Neil Young and Crazy Horse at Hyde Park. Bliss! They opened with the half-hour fuzzfest Driftin’ Back, which meant I could lose myself, obliterate the ego, and forget who I was. Except an endless queue of people formed next to me for two and a half hours, taking me out of the moment every 30 seconds for selfies. All I experienced was an eternal rictus and cripplingly acute self-awareness. I appreciate this is part of the privilege of being a paid performer, but as the Horse burned behind me and I faced away from the stage and smiled and smiled and smiled again, I just wished I was dead.
So for the 2019 Bob Dylan/Neil Young Hyde Park twin gods double-header I bought our tickets as usual but begged a showbiz insider to let me and my kids into the music industry idiots’ area. Just so I could actually watch the show. A woman next to me held up Shazam on her phone to work out what song Dylan was singing. I said: “If you find out tell him.” But imagine Starmer in the stands. It would be 100 times worse and half the people there would hate him anyway.
And now I’m passing out again, too weak to make that woke Wellington. The kids will have to have an old simple family favourite. Hostages and mash.
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on the streaming service Now TV, and his 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf begins at London’s Leicester Square theatre this December
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