A government wine cellar provides “guests of the government, from home and overseas, with wines of appropriate quality at reasonable cost”. Perhaps some of Boris Johnson’s children are kept down there too. We never seem to see many of them. And what happened to Dilyn the dog? We know Johnson was easily bored of new playmates. Is Dilyn cemented into the cellar floor? And maybe if someone has a poke between the wine racks, those missing mobile phones will turn up.
It has become clear that the anticipated publication of records of government wine cellar stock levels, specifically from the pandemic period of 2020 to 2022, is being inexplicably delayed by the Conservatives. Similarly we will never see the uncensored version of the Russia report on Kremlin influence on Brexit and British politics generally. Meanwhile 55 Tufton Street’s Conservative Friends of Russia and Vote Leave founder Matthew Elliott is on his way to the House of Lords, where he will legislate about laws, perhaps including the ones the high court agreed his Vote Leave campaign broke.
I assume, perhaps unfairly, that the delay in publishing the government’s wine stocktake is because more bottles of wine disappeared during the pandemic than there were dignitaries that came to drink them. And remember, no one was allowed to socialise unless they were Tories getting down in Downing Street or boogieing at Lord Shaun “Bums and Boobs” Bailey of Paddington’s Pissedmas disco party, all honouring the piled-high Covid dead through the medium of dance. And projectile-vomiting up the wall. It’s kind of the opposite of the EU wine lake, a vast lake-sized space where a lake-load of wine should have been, but maybe the Get Brexit Done government gone done and drunk it.
Perhaps it is missing wine anxiety (MWA) that explains the unexpected Brexit bonanza plan to sell wine in pint bottles, brilliantly confirming European stereotypes of British people unable to appreciate the finer things in life. “Pint of wine, Dave?” “Don’t mind if I do, Steve. I’ll get the scratchings.”
The Brexit bonus pints-of-wine scheme was instantly dismissed as completely idiotic, costly and impractical by all wine producers and retailers. Personally, I would have preferred the return of freedom of movement, access to the Erasmus programme and the ability for touring musicians to make a living to having some wine in some differently sized bottles. But then I am a tofu-munching north London remainiac.
That said, if the total of missing government wine bottles was somehow to be calculated as if they held wine in pints, rather than in the larger 750ml units, figures for the actual volume of missing wine could be massaged to appear smaller. Is it the same kind of number crunching that last week saw the home secretary, James Shit-hole Cleverly, fudge the unprocessed asylum figures by quibbling over the meaning of the word “processed”? Similarly, I used to get all the kids’ washing for school done instantly by simply reclassifying it as sports kit legacy.
The last thing this Conservative government needs is another scandal involving the sidelining of public funds, whether spent on billions of pounds of PPE, or on a few full-bodied reds for Johnson and his lockdown winebibbers. It’s another nail in Carol Vorderman’s ceremonial Tory coffin surely? And yet what really made the headlines last month was the fact that the home secretary, James Shit-hole Cleverly, made a joke.
Shit-hole fancies himself as something of an expert on comedy, but last week he learned how hard it can be to land the laugh. Shit-hole once tweeted that he “liked Stewart Lee a lot better when he was funny”, suggesting he has been following my career since the 1980s and is perhaps still bearing a grudge from the time when, after a gig at Ealing College of Higher Education in 1990, I declined to sign his cock with marker pen.
In December, Shit-hole made a wife joke to female guests at a Downing Street reception, saying: “Rohypnol in her drink every night” was “not really illegal if it’s only a little bit” (the same sort of attitude Tories have to giving money to their mates’ companies). From this I deduce Shit-hole was probably more of a fan of my surly 90s nihilist standup, from back when we all thought the (wrongly) perceived pervasive triumph of political correctness gave us a licence to be ironically unpleasant. Nonetheless, comedy is the hardest job in the world, even harder than being a firefighter or owning JD Wetherspoon, and I have some sympathy for Shit-hole’s predicament.
Because, to be fair, Shit-hole made his Rohypnol joke in what he thought was a relatively private situation to people he assumed he had some kind of relationship of trust with. The comedian’s job is, on some level, to take a raw room and manufacture consent. Sky TV’s ukulele-loving Frank Skinner (MBE) is a master of this, using a gradual escalation of apparently innocent Swiftian techniques to coerce audiences into laughing at the most dubious topics. Shit-hole clearly isn’t, but must have other skills. (Apparently, Shit-hole is an adept player of the strategy game Warhammer ™ ®, set in a collapsing empire of dying planets where humans barely survive in failing ecosystems. It must be nice to switch off from work and relax.)
The average person can be forgiven for thinking comedy is just Netflix wankers ridiculing trans and disabled people, but it is actually an art form; and part of that art form is about reading the room, even if it’s a Downing Street reception room. Arthur Smith, who in the end had to give up drinking, used to say the comedian should always be one drink ahead of the audience. Perhaps if there’d been more wine left for everyone to drink at that Downing Street reception, Shit-hole might have stormed it.
Basic Lee tour dates are here
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