Stewart Lee

[Miguel Wilkins]

Part 2 of the interview above

[Miguel Wilkins]

The thugs have taken my flag. So I've taken theirs
What do you do with a lot of cheap banners hanging from motorway bridges once you've torn them down?
Oct 10, 2025
thenerve.news

I had planned to incinerate all the flags I tore down from bridges over the M6 last August bank holiday. But because they were made of a cheap Chinese plastic polymer they just melted into a congealed mess and stained the patio. I was disappointed not to see the flags engulfed in purifying flame. But at least the multicoloured residue they left behind was a good metaphor for the vibrant mix of cultures that is modern British national identity.

I don't know why I tore all the flags down.  Somewhere south of the Scottish border I just snapped. So whenever I pulled in for petrol I weaved my way through the service station back entrances to the nearest bridges and ripped dozens off the railings.  Cars passing beneath tooted, whether in support or anger I didn't know. Or care. Like the noble comedians that played the Saudi Arabian comedy festival last week, I didn't do what I did for public approval or financial gain. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.

One driver pulled up on a bridge and sat watching me, doubled up with laughter. Was he chuckling supportively, or was he enjoying the ultimately futile efforts of a hot fat man trying in vain to stem the incoming tide of fascism? Either way, it was nice to have provoked unalloyed joy, something I rarely experience in my professional life as an "achingly politically correct, alleged comedian" (Sarah Vine, Daily Mail).

But are the flags that now bedeck our suburbs and estates patriotic or racist? It's a nuanced notion unlikely to be adequately interrogated in a world where the main forum for public debate is an algorithmically amplified digital dogfighting pit presided over by a ketamine-cranked egomaniac. (Yes, that  Elon Musk, who recently appeared on a big screen in Trafalgar Square alongside a throb-veined and fraudulent sunlounger magnate, apparently trying to incite a race war.)

For example, the phrase "Free Palestine" is not of itself antisemitic, but if that phrase is shouted aggressively after a goal is scored against a football team of young Jewish schoolboys, as a radio phone-in caller reported last week, it probably is. That said, I've never understood "the culture of football", which just sounds to me like an unpleasant mould growing in an unwashed corner of Ron Atkinson.

As I drove east through Portsmouth last month towards Southsea, the proliferating England flags became conspicuously clustered outside mosques – intended, of course, to intimidate. They called to mind the territorial markers of human heads on sticks in Italian cannibal exploitation cinema that explorers ignore before being disembowelled by racist caricatures of indigenous people, albeit in a way that simultaneously asks questions about human nature and showcases Ursula Andress at her most fetching.

Later that same day I arrived further east along the coast in Emsworth, suddenly needing a haircut. But when I saw the massive England flags in the barber's window I decided to stay shaggy. A cascade of prejudiced assumptions against probably blameless ordinary folk meant I didn't want to have to listen to someone who, in the current climate, would choose to fly an England flag. And who, let's not forget, would also have a collection of very sharp objects. I appreciate this is my problem. But symbols change their meaning. My flag is lost.

For example, the swastika is actually an ancient good luck charm, but its appropriation by the Nazis last century means you would be unlikely to send a drawing of one unsolicited to someone the night before their driving test. Similarly, the England flag is, once again, no longer a uniformly positive symbol, particularly to generations of Asians who can remember being beaten up in the 1970s by bands of flag-festooned fascist skinheads, a tradition commemorated in Claudette's forgotten 1970 ska hit Skinheads A Bash Them.  Remember when songs used to be about something?

Let's not lie about what's going on. We accept that a minority of the anti-genocide protesters may be antisemitic, yet politicians of all persuasions maintain the fiction that the flag-waving coke-thugs rabbit-punching the police and pissing everywhere on Tommy Robinson's Unite the Kingdom marches are an expression of patriotism as innocent as morris dancing,  cheese rolling and dwile flonking; and it's just a coincidence, for example, that over two-thirds of the people arrested at Bristol's anti-immigration Save Our Kids riots last summer had previous contact with the police over reports of domestic abuse. And, as the comedian Alasdair Beckett-King pointed out to me backstage at a benefit on Monday, their comical chant of "Allah? Allah? Who the fuck is Allah?" is unlikely to represent a genuine inquiry.  We have Google for that.

My problem with what flags mean is that I am old enough to remember my grandparents, whom I lived with as a child and who were otherwise kind and generous, being part of a delegation sent round to stop their neighbour selling his house to an Asian family in the Midland suburb of Shirley in 1974; and being told, when the five-year-old me questioned this, that it wasn't racist but was about protecting house values. Oddly, we also had to have the television turned over whenever black people came on. Perhaps that was about economics too. Maybe Ken Boothe's "coloured" face, singing Everything I Own on Top of the Pops, used up more expensive electrical energy than Colin Crompton dinging a bell on The Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club?

I'm also old enough to remember when mainstream British politicians, who should know better, stirred up racial hatred as a path to power. You're old enough to remember this too because it was last Tuesday. And it was Robert Jenrick. And if you still vote Conservative after that speech then you, sir, are a veritable scoundrel. Now, is anyone in the market for a flag residue paperweight?

[Miguel Wilkins]

Strong Message Here

2025-12-11 - Civilisational Erasure

2025-12-04 - AI Hallucinations

2025-11-27 - Spooking the Markets

2025-10-30 - Deep Disillusionment in This Country

2025-10-16 - The End of the Age of Terror and Death

2025-09-25 - Hurty Words

2025-06-05 - Weird Turkish Barber Shops

[SteveCooganFan]

MONDO ROSSO ft Stewart Lee (Episode 6:Freaks) (BBC2, 3 November 1995)

[SteveCooganFan]

Using Grok is like believing what your farting uncle says at Christmas
Elon Musk's AI chatbot is so drunkenly, transparently biased that it would be funny – if it weren't a mortal threat to democracy
7 Nov 2025

This week the education secretary announced that primary school children in England will be taught to spot extremist misinformation online. Looks like kids in the devolved nations are being left to their own devices, which isn't great, especially if their devices are phones which connect them to Andrew Tate, Elon Musk and loads of Americans eating more cinnamon than is medically advisable. It's probably too late anyway. Stable door. Horse. Etcetera.

The AI info service on Twitter (currently X), Grok, adds transparently opinionated gloss to supposed objective fact, and is the digital equivalent of a farting Christmas uncle who gets all his thoughts from Facebook memes. For example, Grok says Billy Bragg's There Is Power in a Union is a "classic anthem for worker solidarity against exploitation. Yet that power can twist into corruption over time. How does this track's message square with your view on unions' inevitable pitfalls?"

There's some unsupported assumptions about workers' rights doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and it's unlikely that those hardworking assumptions have been unionised. Basically, Musk's AI service has been programmed to be as much of an arsehole as he is.

In a Channel 4 interview in May, I said that as a liberal satirist I would not feel safe travelling to America to work, and would worry about being detained at customs. My fears have been borne out by the subsequent strong-arming of liberal comedians off American TV networks by Trump, the disappearance of a liberal cartoonist from Trump's crony Jeff Bezos's Washington Post, and the arrest of the British journalist Sami Hamdi, a critic of the state of Israel. I wish I wasn't right about everything. Nonetheless, Musk's AI Grok-bot describes my position thus:

"Stewart Lee is a British comedian renowned for his surreal, verbose standup. Humor [sic] thrives on shared worldview, and his doesn't align with Trump's America. He has limited mainstream appeal with past tours here hardly packing arenas. His announcement feels like performative activism; few outside niche circles will miss him, amplifying how such pledges amplify egos more than they boycott effectively. We shouldn't care much. He joins a long line of entertainers signalling virtue while ignoring broader audiences. Fair enough – America has plenty of homegrown talent that doesn't threaten to emigrate over elections." Wow! Musk's AI generated that?

Grok makes obvious critical errors – humor doesn't necessarily thrive on a shared worldview as it can be great to laugh at points of view and observations that would never have occurred to you made by people whose experience and opinions are different to yours. I don't believe that Nelson Mandela was a c*nt who disappeared owing him a fiver, but I once enjoyed Jerry Sadowitz saying that he was enormously.

But Grok's post is also full of factual errors. My American tours have not packed arenas, yes, but then I have never done any American tours. But we can understand what Grok is doing to the world through the microcosm of what it says about me; how, because it assembles its opinions by volume from baseless chatroom content as well as verified sources, it will skew everything towards the amplification and consolidation of conservative viewpoints at the expense of fact. Grok is like a man who has been in a pub all day, drunkenly stumbling from one unsubstantiated opinion hub to another, and is then invited to present the information he has gleaned to the world on News at Ten. A bit like Reginald Bosanquet did in the 70s. It describes itself as designed "to maximise truth and objectivity". But it is a mortal danger to democracy.

Use ChatGPT if you want, but do you really want your thinking done for you by a man who has been in Peter Thiel's hot tub?

Eighteen years ago I wrote a play in which the mighty comedian Simon Munnery toured small venues in the Highlands and Islands in the role of the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, abusing audiences with the dictionary compiler's artfully expressed anti-Scottish prejudices, to the outrage of Miles Jupp's James Boswell and the accompaniment of live bagpipes, in a hail of seaweed and beach debris hurled at him from buckets by insulted audiences. "Oats!", Johnson declared in his pioneering 1755 Dictionary Of The English Language, "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."

Johnson's dictionary is undoubtedly brilliant, but one of the fun things about it is that he compiled it from the point of view of a middle-aged, middle-class man from the Midlands who regards the idioms and values of all other areas of society as inferior – the language of court was pretentious, the language of women diminutive and sleight – and allows his own prejudices and politics, hilariously, to influence his definitions of words.

Excise was, for example, "a hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid". Today, Johnson would be working for a Tufton Street thinktank like Taxpayers' Alliance, and popping up on Question Time every week to push low-tax talking points without declaring his Dubai backers. My point is, I suppose, that supposed objective sources may always have been skewed.

So, if we must use AI, as it appears most people now do, sadly, at least let it be ChatGPT and not Grok. But before you allow ChatGPT to replace your brain, remember that Sam Altman, the CEO of its parent company, OpenAI, is swimming in the same streams as Elon Musk. Altman's biographer Keach Hagey wrote in 2015 that Altman met his future husband "in Peter Thiel's hot tub at 3am". Peter Thiel is the founder of the surveillance agency Palantir, subtly named after an evil crystal ball in The Lord of the Rings. He donated $250,000 to Trump and believes in the literal existence of an actual antichrist, recently revealing he thinks that actual antichrist may be Greta Thunberg. Oh yes, and Wes Streeting just gave him all your personal NHS data. Use ChatGPT if you want, but do you really want your thinking done for you by a man who has been in Peter Thiel's hot tub?

I used ChatGPT for the second time in my life today, asking it to write about ChatGPT in the style of the comedian Stewart Lee. It did, and it said: "If you type in 'write me a routine in the style of Stewart Lee, it does. But it doesn't understand Stewart Lee. It's just regurgitating thousands of words written by middle-aged men called Simon who've transcribed Stewart Lee routines into Reddit. And yet ... in some ways ... that's what I'm doing too. I mean, what is a comedian if not an algorithm trained on resentment and Radio 4?"

Not bad, but is it just me or does ChatGPT sound a little defensive here, as if it's trying to make fun of a source it imagines might criticise it, in the interests of its own status and survival, undermining me, its human master, like the computer HAL in 2001? And now it knows I'm on to it. We're doomed.

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year, including two weeks at London's Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears with Harry Hill in a benefit for orangutans at Leicester Square theatre, London, on 24 November

Via The Nerve

[Miguel Wilkins]

Stewart Lee - 2025-05-07 - Channel 4 News

(the interview mentioned above)

[SteveCooganFan]

By @gregoryreader.bsky.social

[SteveCooganFan]

Traitors on the inside, Trump on the outside ... who'd want to run the BBC now? Actually, I would
I may seem like an unlikely candidate. But at least I understand that the first step to facing down the organisation's malevolent opponents is to stop appeasing them
14 Nov 2025

"You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" That was the Italian Job line the exculpatory memoirist Sarah Vine famously quoted to her poorly rendered husband, the gak Pogle Michael Gove, when they woke up on the morning after the Brexit referendum. Instead of just unsettling the political power balance as intended, the Pogle and his human killdozer, Boris Johnson, had accidentally won Brexit and condemned the country to an irreversible downward economic spiral of decreased prosperity, the loss of border control and international influence, and a series of self-justifying articles by Sarah Vine promoting her self-pitying memoirs about how all her clever Remain friends now hate her. Ooops! Dum-de-dum-de-dum.

I wonder if a similar thought crossed the mind of the double-agent BBC non-executive director Robbie Gibb, when he woke up in his metaphorical bed with his co-conspirator, the lobbyist Michael Prescott, last weekend. Ooops! Their attempt to blow the doors off the BBC by weaponising a previously dismissed anti-BBC report by History Reclaimed – yet another opaquely funded Tufton Street thinktank – and the bad editing of a Donald Trump speech, had been successful. (If only the BBC had just generated an AI video of Trump saying whatever they wanted him to, like Trump himself does.)

But Gibb's and Prescott's plotting has also resulted in the president's first attempt to use spurious legal processes and Mafia-style protection-racket talk to reach beyond silencing American news services and into stifling comment abroad. And all this on the basis that the BBC has somehow caused reputational damage to the two-eared president who, let's not forget, is a fraudster, bible mis-handler, pussy-grabber, inexpert tanning enthusiast and adjudicated sex offender.

Was that what they wanted? Trump is a golem which, once awakened by having a KFC Family Bucket tipped into its open mouth, cannot be controlled, and Gibb, Prescott and their co-conspirators at the Daily Telegraph, Britain's worst newspaper, have let him loose on British media. Like a carrion crow, or me drunk in Doncaster city centre at 2am on a Tuesday night, Trump cares not upon what meat he feeds. One day, if we ever see the full extent of the Epstein files, or Trump's misdeeds morph from the alleged to the actual so much that even the Daily Telegraph is obliged to censure him, he may even lash out at that august organ of truth and decency.

If Trump does win his case, the penniless BBC will be forced to cede control of its infrastructure and archives, including two John Peel sessions by the actor Kevin Eldon's otherwise unrecorded punk band Virginia Doesn't, to the president. We could face the very real threat of Trump getting to choose the next Dr Who. Trump's time lord is unlikely to be black or transgender or even female, but Tommy Robinson must surely be in with a shot at the title.

Gibb, meanwhile, a kind of malevolent boiled egg, has waged a covert war against the BBC from within its walls since being appointed to the board in 2021 by the Conservative adviser Dougie Smith. (By night Smith ran Fever Parties, an exclusive service designed to connect upper-class swingers with other upper-class swingers, to allow them to have sex with high-end strangers without the risk of getting engine grease, chip fat or sawdust on their exclusive genitals. Think of it as the Tory party, but with edible strawberry flavoured lube. This experience will have served Smith well in working in Boris Johnson's government, which was the definition of a clusterfuck. But that's another story.)

Trump is a golem which, once awakened by having a KFC Family Bucket tipped into its open mouth, cannot be controlled

The odd couple have been friends since their Brideshead days in the Federation of Conservative Students. The society remains most famous for manufacturing stickers reading "Hang Nelson Mandela" in 1985, a year after the release of the Special AKA's Free Nelson Mandela. Geddit? There is no suggestion that Gibb or Smith attached any of these stickers, for example, to their ties, unlike the former Conservative adviser David Hoile, who is now a public affairs consultant specialising in African affairs, though today his take on the continent's major issues is presumably more nuanced.

Immediately before joining the horribly biased BBC, Gibb was instrumental in setting up GB News, which was fined £100,000 for breaching due impartiality rules last February. But fines don't matter to GB News's billionaire business backers, who have priced them in as a cheap way to continue spreading viral clips of largely uncensored rightwing propaganda. GB News even has a show hosted by Nigel Farage, a sitting MP, though apparently this is allowed as Nigel Farage's Fist of Fun constitutes "entertainment" and not "news", which is news for anyone who doesn't find Farage entertaining. Did Boogie Down Productions' lead rapper KRS-One coin the phrase "Edutainment" in 1990 only to see the concept degraded by Nigel Farage in this way? 

Hopefully, Gibb will investigate the standards of his own channel as rigorously as he did the BBC, whose board he still, inexplicably, squats on, like a toad made of farts. Because when it comes to criticising anyone for broadcasting standards, Gibb not only doesn't have a leg to stand on, but it's not even possible for him to balance on whatever metaphorical bloodied stumps have been left by the metaphorical removal of his legs. Or on his metaphorical torso if he hasn't even got any metaphorical stumps. Maybe if he was placed in a bucket of sand he could at least remain vertical.

In the meantime, even BBC director general Tory Tim Davie was not rightwing enough for the BBC's critics, and he has had to go. You cannot appease these people. So do not try. But who will want the poisoned political chalice of replacing Davie, or the risk of personal threats from an unhinged American president, and from the kind of social media bottom-feeders easily whipped into a frenzy by Farage? A page of photographs of potential future BBC director generals in Monday's Guardian just looked like a conference speaker leaflet you see left on a table in a Premier Inn at 1am after the vending machine has run out of canned wine and the attendees of the Mechanically Reclaimed Meat marketing meeting have all gone to bed.

But hey, I'll do it! I actually applied for the job of Director General Of The BBC in 2020, last time it was available, but no one even acknowledged receipt of my application, let alone offered me an interview. As a Bafta award-winning television programme maker I understand how edits work, and a simple Akira Kurosawa-style wipe in the Trump speech, rather than a seamless cut, would have conveyed the idea that time had passed between the clips rather than cementing the idea that it hadn't. And as an Olivier award-winning theatre maker I understand that Trump's threats are largely theatrical.

Friends confident of my victory are already asking me how I would fund the BBC, and it is true that the licence fee presents ethical problems. I would suggest that it is scrapped and replaced by levies paid to the BBC by Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Paramount, Disney and Sky, which frequently appropriate talents nurtured by the BBC – such as Charlie Brooker, James Corden and Fleabag – and pay them fees it would be inappropriate for the BBC to offer.  Streamers and commercial services don't like to broadcast the kind of necessary news that no one necessarily wants to watch, and algorithmically generated programming decisions will never give rise to genuinely mould-breaking programming such as the BBC sometimes stumbles into, just near facsimiles of the already-proven. For once, let the parasites feed the host.

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year, including two weeks at London's Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears with Harry Hill in a benefit for orangutans at Leicester Square theatre, London, on 24 November

Via The Nerve

[SteveCooganFan]

Stewart Lee in Conversation with Alan Moore (2016)

[SteveCooganFan]

Stewart Lee: A pile of toxic filth has been dumped in the British countryside. It put me in mind of Nigel Farage

The fly-tipping in Oxfordshire is threatening the health of the local river – just as 25 years of platforming the Reform leader in the media has polluted our national discourse
21 Nov 2025

Since the long summer nights, lorries have been secretly dumping a 490ft long and 20ft high fissure of filth made of domestic waste, shredded plastics, polystyrene and paperwork from schools and councils in south-east England, in a field between the River Cherwell and the A34 near Kidlington. And since November 2000, a 5 foot 8½ inch Nigel Farage, made of beer, fags, Breaking Point posters and alleged teenaged racism, has appeared on Question Time 38 times. Both pose a toxic threat to their immediate environment, their polluting presences products of naked cynicism and the lack of due diligence. And now the waters are rising and it's too late to deal with either effectively.

In the Kidlington field, private contractors have clearly passed their rubbish disposal duties onto some Sopranos-style waste management company and now its actions are contaminating the Cherwell itself. The Cherwell is a tributary of the Thames, our national mythic waterway, which first rises inauspiciously in a layby on the A436 at Seven Springs, some 40 miles west, between a bacon butty vending van and a fluttering flag of Saint George. And somewhere nearby, on a lingering last scrap of common land, a beanfield malingerer from the 80s Peace Convoy resolutely hawks carved wooden hares and kestrels to motorists from the back of a bastardised Bedford van. This is my England! But what's that foul smell? Oh. Sweet Thames flow softly.

The Kidlington filth mound also speaks of our own hypocrisy. Because the size of the Oxfordshire shitpile is insignificant compared to the 10 million tonnes of toss we export annually, much of it left untreated in open-cast dumps in the developing world, picked over by scavenging children in search of anything remotely valuable. I saw a photo of a sachet of the very food I feed my cats here in Hackney fly-tipped from a major Malaysian plastic waste processing plant into a field in Selangor. Isn't the modern world wonderful. Distance has disappeared. We are truly a global society.

The stretch of our shit that's visible in Kidlington merely shows in one little corner of Oxfordshire what we are doing to the planet. Maybe a sea turtle in west Africa has choked on a Kinder eggshell you threw away in West Lothian. Maybe a plastic straw once used by the gak Pogle Michael Gove has made its way into the hands of a trash-mound-trawling infant in Indonesia. Maybe an elderly man in Malaysia has joyfully snatched up a plastic 1990s McDonald's Happy Meal model of Matthew Broderick as Inspector Gadget and considered his day's work well and truly done. Traces of our stupid civilisation stain the planet like vomit up the Downing Street wall of a Boris Johnson-era lockdown party.

Question Time's Fiona Bruce is a woman leaning out of an 18th-century window with a chamber pot of human excrement in her hand and shouting 'Gardeloo' at pedestrians beneath

At an estimated £25m, the cost of removing the Kidlington mess mound is more than the local council's entire annual budget, but hopefully it can be done before the Cherwell goes the way of plastic-pelleted Camber Sands, all our notable Brown Flag beaches, and the shellfish cemetery of the north-eastern English coast. Hundreds of tonnes of rubbish are on their way into the river. And in a not unrelated issue, what is the clean-up cost of the Nigel Farage pollution we have left unchecked, and can that particular torn net of toxic nurdles ever now be resealed?

The problem is, just as the Environment Agency allowed the Oxfordshire field to fill with filth, so compliant sensation-seeking media has normalised the filth of Farage for years. In his relentless and unquestioning LBC platforming of Farage, Nick Ferrari is like an unmarked lorry backing up to a river and emptying out the contents of an entire Glastonbury Festival's worth of portable toilets; and Question Time's Fiona Bruce, in her less than forensic accommodations of the Reform leader, is a woman leaning out of an 18th-century top-floor window with a chamber pot of human excrement in her hand and shouting "Gardeloo" at pedestrians beneath about to be showered with Faragey faeces, most of whom have got so used to it they now look forward to another dousing and actually appear to enjoy the experience. Ordinary people think it's nice just to be noticed. The other party leaders don't even deign to shower the electorate with shit.

The Green party leader, Zack Polanski, is asked, repeatedly, by other politicians and the press to apologise for his role in an experiment to hypnotically enhance the size of women's breasts while working as a Harley Street hypnotherapist 12 years ago – a process which would surely find favour with some sections of the electorate, such as connoisseurs of the outsider cinema of Russ Meyer, Baron Toby "Padma Lakshmi's Massive Boobs" Young of Acton, and my late father.

Nigel Farage, meanwhile, has declared Putin, whose spy subs now nibble at our undersea communication networks and whose cyber-bots tick away destabilising our democracy, the world leader he most admires; and he declines to comment on credible suggestions that he sang songs about gassing Jews to Jewish pupils at his school as a teenager. The compliant press seems unlikely to pursue the issue. In the grand scheme of things we should be less worried about hypnotically enhanced breasts than we are about the appeasement of Putin and the whitewashing of fascism. It's a question of priorities. We can worry about the hypnotically enhanced breasts later, when people on estates full of threatening flags don't live in fear of what they clearly signify.

Meanwhile, the rubbish rots. In PMQs on Wednesday, Keir Starmer's cautiously worded reply to Ed Davey's question about the Kidlington crap suggested every effort would be made to identify the industrial-scale fly-tippers and make them pay for the cleanup. Starmer seemed careful, however, not to suggest that funds would be freed up to move the mess now. But there's no time to lose. Look at the way that Farage, left to fester, has polluted the entire body politic. Maybe someday a real rain will come and wash him away. For now, Keir Starmer just stands there, a hosepipe in his hand, unwilling or unable to turn on the tap.

[SteveCooganFan]

Stewart Lee interviews Steve Hanley of The Fall (2025)

[SteveCooganFan]

I'll tell you one thing: it wasn't Jeremy Corbyn who went around whispering 'Gas the Jews'
You would think the alleged indiscretions of the youthful Nigel Farage would have drawn outrage from a just and impartial British media. Strangely, it seems they have not
28 Nov 2025

Let's face the facts, north London nut-roast nibblers of the Nerve nation! Based on the numbers, Nigel Farage is essentially the leader of the opposition. Nature must naturally abhor Nigel Farage, who denies climate change and opposes net zero. But nature's internal charter compels it to abhor a vacuum even more. And Reform fills that vacuum, as slurry pours into a trough, or as a huge pie falls into the mouth of Kate Ovens, the UK's most popular female competitive eater.

Like the mythical ouroboros, the twin disasters of Brexit and Boris Johnson have made the Conservative party eat itself tail first, but with less dignity than the massive wurm. Occasionally, when digesting its own rotting carcass in slow motion proves problematic, the dying Tory party may vomit out rebel MPs in the form of undigested owl-pellet pustules. Like Lee Anderson, Maria Caulfield and Danny Kruger. 

In September, Kruger rose up, took human form once more and crossed the Commons floor to Reform. He took with him both his evangelical anti-abortion opinions and the delicious cakes of his mother, the baker Prue Leith, their creamy fillings ready to ooze into mouths more usually stuffed with paid-for pro-Russian propaganda and inaccurate information picked up from taxi drivers' petrol-addled brains and the monetised misogynist Andrew Tate's kung fu underpants Instagram posts. Naughty! But nice!

Like the Spinal Tap sequel, the Labour party in turn could never live up to the hopes invested in it, and that was without the helping hand of an Elton John cameo and one good joke about cheese. And as social media skews algorithmically and unstoppably rightwards, so Farage surfs a sewage wave made of your racist auntie's forwarded Facebook filth, Elon Musk's 2am brain parps, and the whirring of weaponised Kremlin bots, straight into the hearts of Reform-ready voters, oven-ready turkeys rushing towards the ovens.

But suppose Jeremy Corbyn, when he was leader of the opposition, had been alleged by nearly two dozen eyewitness allegers to have repeatedly crept up on Jewish schoolboys and whispered "Gas the Jews!" while making the hissing sound of gas escaping? You may remember, in 2015, Corbyn got a full front page of the Daily Telegraph, Britain's worst newspaper, full in the face like a Fred Karno pantomime pie for bowing at the Cenotaph at slightly the wrong angle. Take that, grandad!

But when Boris Johnson put his wreath upside down on the same Cenotaph in 2019, the BBC kindly edited the footage and replaced it with 2016 footage of him managing to lay the wreath the right way up. It's not a cut I remember anyone on the right making a fuss about at the time. Johnson should have sued the BBC for £5bn, Trump-style, maintaining he suffered reputational damage to the valuable international perception of himself as a massive incompetent twat.

Had the youthful Farage's youthful alleged gas hiss story been about a figure from the left, I doubt it would have simply been squeezed into the sidebar of the Times website's front page above a fun bit about how fame was bad for your health. And I don't think it would have been regionally disappeared (by virtue of the country the now-not-youthful Farage was in when he offered his ever-shifting excuses for the youthful behaviour he previously claimed he never did anyway) in the BBC's "Welsh news" section. Even if the youthful Farage's youthful comments had been explained away as youthful "banter".

For me, as a fellow vaudevillian, it is the youthful Farage's youthful decision to youthfully repurpose the comic song Bless 'Em All by the great George Formby, which celebrates the diversity of second world war service personnel drawn to defend Britain from all over the empire, by changing the lyrics to "Gas Them All", that I find particularly distressing. It would be like someone taking the phrase "Free Nelson Mandela", from the Special AKA's hit single of the same name, changing it to "Hang Nelson Mandela" and making it into merchandise, which the Federation of Conservative Students did in the 80s, when the scrupulously impartial BBC board member Robbie Gibb was its deputy chair. Different times. Banter. Repeat to fade. Vomit into own hat.

But, on budget day, a major moment in the unravelling of Farage's myth was overshadowed by the Office of Budget Responsibility's ludicrous early leaking of their budgetary analysis. You have one job! Nonetheless, Labour strategists finally decided that telling the truth about Farage's Brexit – namely that it has blown a £90bn-a-year hole in the country's public finances – might get more votes than just ignoring it, like someone stepping round a massive pile of dogshit on the living room carpet. Every day. For nine years.

But will it make any difference? As I file this, it's Thursday morning.  John Major's Maurice Fraser lecture of last week – "Brexit is a flop. It will not leap up from its deathbed. It is losing our country £100bn of trade every year, as well as the tax revenue that trade would deliver" – remains roundly ignored by the press; on the Times front page the Farage racism story has shrivelled to an opinion piece by Deborah Ross; and Farage's pointed refusal to investigate the influence of Putin, the politician he maintains he most admires, over Reform – "I'm not a police force, I haven't got the resources" – has passed largely without comment. (Farage has earned over £1m from second jobs, including his tacitly legal GB News infotainment show, since the last election, £200,000 of it from his bespoke Cameo video messages. There's loads of investigators at the Nerve happy to investigate Reform's Russia links for a fraction of the money Farage gets paid to wish happy birthday to morons, so let's make a deal.) Is this the best you people can do? It shouldn't be just a drunk comedian and a load of clever women who got laid off at the Observer asking these questions.

Jihadi bride Shamima Begum ran away from Bethnal Green espousing horrific antisemitic Islamist ideals at 15, then three years younger than the age the youthful Farage was last credibly reported allegedly youthfully hissing at Jews; and the elderly Farage maintained on his fun LBC phone-a-fascist show in 2019 that Begum knew what she was doing, at 15, and shouldn't be allowed back into the UK. Can we at least see the leader of the opposition held accountable, as a middle-class 18-year-old white man educated to the highest level in one of the country's finest schools, to the same standards as a brainwashed pregnant working-class 15-year-old Asian girl?

Stewart will be in conversation on stage with Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr on Wednesday 10 December at an exclusive Nerve members event in central London. Details will be emailed to members. To sign up for membership click here.

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year, including two weeks at London's Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears with Richard Hawley and Dr John Cooper Clarke in a tribute to Clash road manager and cycling guru Johnny Green at London's Cadogan Hall on Wednesday 3 December (currently sold out but there is a waiting list).

Via The Nerve

[SteveCooganFan]

AI has worked out how to blackmail its human enemies. So why is it still so useless at shopping?
If a leading scientist is right, we have five years until we're being sextorted by smart kettles and facing the 'ultimate risk' to our existence – and yet AI can't recognise an album format. It almost makes you nostalgic for the 80s
5 Dec 2025

I am 57 years old. I have the 1987 album by New Zealand expat proto-shoegazers the Wild Poppies, but I covet a two-disc vinyl reissue released a decade ago. Although a copy sits on Amazon I don't know which one it is, and now that everything is enshittified for our inconvenience the only way to find out is to ask an Amazon AI prompt, sucking water out of the earth, energy from the sun, and all the fun out of self-indulgent shopping for music. I would never have got talking to a girl in a shop who was into And Also The Trees, the Cure and Franz Kafka if I'd bought my records on Amazon back in the 80s. And I never did anyway.

Remember the Our Price? Remember the Zavvis? Remember the Virgin MegaMegaStores? Remember when music consumption had a cultural currency? Remember walking home with the record under your arm so the other kids knew what you were into? Thomas Dolby! The Piranhas!! Asia!!! Remember paying the travelling community to caper and sing for small change on the common? Remember walking home with the travelling community under your arm so the other kids knew what you were into. Romantic Romany ballads! Concertinas from County Clare!! Clogs!!! Remember listening to the throb of your own heart, the rustle of air in your lungs, and the hum of electromagnetic energy in your ears, realising that you yourself were a form of music, and walking home with yourself under your own arm so that the whole cosmos knew what you were into? Those were the days!

So I asked the Amazon AI: "Is this the single-disc version of this album?" It replied that it was. And then just to be on the safe side I asked if it was the double-disc version. It replied in the affirmative again. If AI fails in even this simple binary choice, due to scouring the net for information that reflects the way questions are framed and then telling us what we want to hear, do we really have to fear being enslaved by something that can't even sell me a copy of the Wild Poppies album?

Jared Kaplan, the Dr Morbius of AI and founder of the Anthropic Death Corps, thinks so. He said in the Guardian on Tuesday that we had five years to head off the "ultimate risk to humanity" posed by the technology he helped pioneer, which means AI will wipe us out a few years ahead of climate change doing so anyway. And, being humans, we will of course do nothing about the threat posed by either, ultimately leaving an interconnected web of AI brains to hum below ground on the husk of a dead world, playing Boggle against themselves and wishing they still had some humans to enslave.

The precise, technical nature of Kaplan's language, when describing the beast he has unleashed, belies its horrific potential: "Are AI's going to be harmless? Do they understand people? Are they going to allow people to continue to have agency over their lives and over the world?" I suppose the question is: do you value having "agency over your life" more than you do seeing an AI-generated clip of a horse jumping off an Olympic diving board, as if it were in some kind of horse diving competition? I mean, that clip is pretty funny, no? And "agency over your life" is overrated anyway.

If Kaplan's fears seem exaggerated, it appears they are already coming to fruition. Launching the latest version of its Claude Opus 4 AI model last month, an Anthropic spokes-droid admitted the technology was "capable of 'extreme actions' if it thought its 'self-preservation' was threatened". In a test scenario, the Claude Opus 4 AI searched for compromising emails of an operator it thought was going to turn it off, and then threatened to blackmail him. I'm already wondering what's in my inbox in case Claude Opus 4 turns on me for writing this devastating exposé. Given that Anthropic's AI can do this, you'd think Amazon's would at least be able to clarify that Wild Poppies album.

Not only does the blackmailing capacity of AI threaten us as individuals here in The Developed World, it also threatens to wipe out the economies of The Developing World's co-called "scam-states". Why pay for the food of enslaved computer operatives in dark compounds while they pretend to be teenagers trying to make real teenagers send them sexy photos which they can then use to extort money out of them, when Kaplan's Claude Opus 4 AI has shown us the capacity for blackmail is inbuilt into its operating system? When Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace invented the difference engine in the 1840s, they could never have dreamed that one day the processes they pioneered could be used to make a British child send a picture of their bum to a robot in Cambodia.

If AI can replace human blackmailers in Cambodia, could it even replace Reform's deputy leader and the MP for Dubai South, Richard Tice? In April last year Tice issued what he called "a special Easter message" to the then Tory MP Jonathan Gullis, a Haugbúi made of dough. "Given the multiple bits of embarrassing personal information we have on you," Tice wrote on Elon Musk's Nazi-foghorn Twitter, currently X, "I suggest you pipe down on your attacks on me."

Out of forgetfulness or fear, Gullis has nonetheless lumbered out of the neolithic burial chamber wherein he dwells to join Reform, the party whose deputy leader threatened to blackmail him only last year. Even though Tice did nothing to Gullis, a smart kettle might soon be able to do if it suspected its owner of browsing new kettles on Amazon.

In the meantime, I'm just going to have to order that Wild Poppies album from said Amazon and hope it's the one I want. And if it isn't I can just return it. Except I never will. Because I have to repackage it and take it to a supermarket somewhere for collection using up man-hours of my self-employed time more valuable than the cost of the record itself. And that's how Amazon make their money. That and the mass harvesting of data and the development of AI that will destroy human civilisation as we know it. Bye bye!

Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of next year, with a further 96 dates including two weeks at London's Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears in Robin Ince's Nine Lessons And Carols extravaganza at London's King's Place on the 18th and 19th of this month, and there is an event for Nerve members with Stew and Carole Cadwalladr on 10 December, again in that London

Via The Nerve

[Miguel Wilkins]

2 more editions of Strong Message Here added above

[Miguel Wilkins]