It’s half term and I am rewriting the opening topical 20 minutes of my touring standup show. Again. Damn Rishi’s rollercoaster ride. The current Conservative cabinet has had more lineup changes than the Fall, but will not leave as significant a cultural legacy, bar a similarly large succession of weighty books trying to make subsequent sense of what happened. If it’s Rishi Sunak and your granny on bongos, then this is the Conservative government.
My tight five on Nadhim Zahawi, I reluctantly admit, will not make it to the show in Coventry on Wednesday, despite the reliable laugh quota generated all around the land by the mere mention of the former minister without portfolio. Once Zahawi didn’t have two portfolios to rub together. But now, he must look back on the days when all he didn’t have was a portfolio with nostalgic regret.
I can already feel Zahawi receding in the collective subconscious, as he joins the other routines, abandoned along the way since September, like Boris Johnson’s discarded children or Jeremy Hunt’s principles, as their subjects slipped from view.
Farewell Liz Truss, who finally dared to put flesh on the bones of the thinktanks’ impossible economic fantasies, old rotten meat stuck to the balsa-wood skeleton of the Institute of Economic Affairs, and began the rout of Tufton Street. Truss will now be remembered, if she is remembered at all, only for a bizarre speech about cheese! We imported two-thirds of our cheese. It was a disgrace, she told us, with blank ire. But within weeks she had cost the country £30bn and the horrible cheese disgrace suddenly seemed less significant. Indeed, how we longed for the cheese disgrace of old.
And goodbye and good riddance also to the morning news radio round golem, Kwasi Kwarteng, always called upon to defend six indefensible things before breakfast! Kwarteng goes back in the economic attic, the secret rune that reanimates him removed from his wet mouth.
And au revoir to the blink-and-you-missed-him environment secretary Ranil Jayawardena, the George Canning of unchecked sewage discharge, the Tory equivalent of those apparently significant characters Jed Mercurio used to write into Line of Duty who’d always die at the end of the first episode, the Spinal Tap drummer of the Truss era. He spontaneously combusted after 49 days. He voted against LGBT-inclusive sex education. He occasionally goes to church. At the going down of the sun, and in the evening, we will not remember him. But this endless churn of osmotic political excrement is making my professional life a lot harder than it needs to be.
There have been so many rotten Conservative politicians making merry since the Brexit campaign shattered standards of decency and honesty in public life that it’s hard to remember them all, which I suspect is a priced-in strategy. Why get worked up about your local MP who lied about Europe, made a mint off a dodgy PPE contract and charged the taxpayer to heat the nests of his fancy mice when there’ll be another equally rotten Tory along in a moment? But did anyone think that the next “another one along in a minute” would be Ashfield MP, Lee Anderson?
Perhaps some patronising creeps behind closed Conservative doors thought Anderson’s “common sense” pronouncements would play well with the fragmenting “red wall” vote, beginning to see beyond the Brexit lies. Indeed, Anderson is a member of the Common Sense Group, which proves he has common sense or why would he be in a group called the Common Sense Group? It’s common sense that people who have been executed will never commit a crime. But it is not common sense to assume they are guilty. By Anderson’s logic it would make sense to execute everyone immediately, in case they turn bad at a later date.
Anderson is an accident waiting to happen to the entire Conservative party. He was recorded bullying a reporter. And he has had an unfortunate photo opportunity with a shy ex-BNP member who apparently has a white supremacist tattoo and is said to sport a “No Remorse White Pride” T-shirt; and also with a fan of the influential white supremacist band Skrewdriver.
It’s easy enough to be photographed with people without it indicating that you support them unequivocally. I was once photographed with the bisc-haired GB News patsy Andrew Neil, for example, yet I never believed Carole Cadwalladr was a “mad cat woman” or that “GB News is the most exciting thing to happen in British television news for more than 20 years”. But had a Labour party member been photographed shaking hands with similar salt of the earth types to Anderson it’s unlikely they’d still be in a position of responsibility.
In November 2019, while canvassing, Anderson was caught by a Mail+ journalist’s microphone arranging for his friend to pose as a supportive constituent and telling him to pretend he didn’t know him personally. “Make out you know who I am… you know I’m the candidate, but not a friend, all right?” The Conservatives are so concerned about electoral fraud they are introducing a raft of punitive ID measures that will disproportionately disenfranchise exactly the kind of voter most likely to vote against them. There were six examples of electoral fraud in the last election. And yet here is Anderson, caught on camera fraudulently trying to influence public opinion, and he is rewarded with the deputy chair of the Conservative party.
Meanwhile, the sewage flows into the rivers, public money continues to flows into the sewers of the Conservative party’s friends and donors and I’ve wasted my breath talking about a strawman who probably isn’t even worth trying to write a standup routine about. Because I could do with a new five minutes that will see me through to the spring at least.
Stewart Lee’s standup shows Snowflake and Tornado are both currently available on BBC iPlayer. Basic Lee tour dates are here
