There’s something fishy going on at Tory HQ… - February 2021 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - February 21st, 2021

Before Brexit, 44% of British musicians, including my showbusiness friend Fish from Marillion, earned up to half their income from now inaccessible European audiences. But, should Fish find some way around the government’s failure to preserve artists’ touring opportunities, his unfortunate choice of stage name could mean he was still subject to time-consuming delays at…

The Brexit government is lost in a fog of lies - August 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 2nd, 2020

Michael Gove is standing in a public waste disposal site in west London, objective reality dissolving around him, surrounded by a semicircle of imaginary attendants he has made himself from discarded rubbish; mop-handle spines, coathanger arms, sofa cushion bodies, and rotting rubber football heads. “These are my attendants, Leapy Lee,” he cried up at me,…

My Neil Diamond tribute to Churchill - June 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - June 28th, 2020

Hibernation is over! Outside our front window, sex workers comfort strangers again, and opposite Sainsbury’s men fight with their shirts off, like boar or rutting stags, arousing passing women, loveless for too long in lockdown. And in Parliament Square, Winston Churchill emerges from his winter wooden box, snuffling the virus-free air like a cocaine groundhog.…

We must honour those brave souls… working with Ricky Gervais - May 2020 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 3rd, 2020

Every Tuesday at 8.45pm, I stand in the silent lane alone and bang my Le Creusets in support of a group of brave people who must never be forgotten; unsung martyrs who, through no fault of their own, have found themselves working at the very heart of a terrible unfolding disaster of an unprecedented scale…

When in doubt, erect a Boris bridge… - September 2019 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 15th, 2019

In the late 80s I used to do standup at a Soho club called Raging Bull, run by the young Eddie Izzard. At half-time we shared our dressing room with male strippers from The Paul Raymond Carnival of Erotica. They would sit naked in their chairs, casually chatting and masturbating, but not for pleasure, merely…

Is Iain Duncan Smith the Brexit bogeyman? - September 2019 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - September 8th, 2019

‘Everyone will have the food they need,” declared Michael Gove to Andrew Marr last Sunday, denying both the lies of Project Fear and the hysterical, biased, ill-informed and suppressed research of his own department. On Tuesday, as the Commons camera drifted past Ken Clarke, I saw the Brexit cheerleader Iain Duncan Smith picking his nose…