Time to embrace the horrors of your Spotify playlist data - August 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 30th, 2015

As Observer-reading ABC1 cultural consumers, our carefully cultivated tastes in film, in literature and in oak-aged cheeses are the exquisite hand-crafted carnival masks that we wear as armour in the awkward middle-class dinner party of life. But the tragic consequences of last week’s Spotify data hack continue to unravel. And we wonder privately what could…

Can we be absolutely certain Iain Duncan Smith is real? - August 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 23rd, 2015

Hair, teeth and ears all present and correct: is Iain Duncan Smith too good to be true? Photograph: ITV/REX Shutterstock Last week, the Department for Work and Pensions tsar, Iain Duncan Smith, was revealed to have fabricated a pamphlet featuring two entirely fictitious former benefit claimants, using Conservative party stationery cupboard scissors and an adhesive…

The Tory trolls are running wild – but all is not lost - August 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 16th, 2015

Last month I was in Languedoc, formerly the fabled Cathar country, a remote outpost of heroic resistance to oppressive distant rulers. This month I am in Edinburgh. Plus ça change. I don’t feel happy away from home at the moment. Like you, I have a terrible feeling that in the last three months the society…

The Tories are using my holiday to change history - August 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - August 9th, 2015

I have been on holiday in an isolated Pyrenean shack for two weeks. I enjoy not being approached by people who think I am the lead singer of UB40 all the time, my wife delights in juicy tomatoes and the kids love eating snails, befriending local snails and swimming with snails in the streams and…

The government’s witch-hunters are ready to reform the BBC to death - July 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 19th, 2015

Due to its legendary nose for news, last week’s Sunday Times was first to reveal the “eight experts” chosen by culture secretary John Whittingdale to “help decide the BBC’s future”, the Murdoch empire barely able to wait to share its horror at the venerable institution’s latest humiliation. And what a golden shower of talent Whittingdale…

Cameron’s monkeys are feasting on the BBC’s nuts - July 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - July 12th, 2015

In January 2014, when a critically endangered water lily was stolen from Kew Gardens, the former Conservative MP Louise Mensch tweeted on her Twitter, “Got to say what’s the point? Ordinary plant hardly worth saving.” The Conservatives can’t even see the point of flowers. It’s asking a lot to expect them to see the point…