There’s a new photo of Nigel Farage and the Reform treasurer, Nick Candy, who partied through the pandemic at Lord Shaun “Bum and Boobs” Bailey of Paddington’s Pissedmas disco with a load of dancing Tory spads in horrible Christmas jumpers, meeting Elon Musk at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago document storage unit slash vanity art display mausoleum. How’s that for an opening para? It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. They think it’s all over. It is now.
The last time Farage posed like this was eight years ago, with his fellow bad boys of Brexit and Trump himself at the same Trump Tower lift where Michael Gove contemporaneously observed “an immensely dignified African American operator”. But now Farage is finally standing next to the organ-grinder in charge of democracy’s hand-cranked dance of death, instead of the orange monkey whose jaunty capering distracts the punters while their passports are lifted and burned.
Farage has openly stated he hopes to find ways to funnel Musk’s offers of enormous funding for the British far right through the UK arm of Musk’s X platform, and knows he can do this legally; and we’ve seen how Musk’s spectrum retooling of vast sections of social media helped deprioritise liberal voices and push Trump towards power, like someone locking a philosophy student in a cupboard at a raucous frat party.
Once, Musk’s social media platform allowed the sharing of these columns, for example, in their thousands and garlanded me with limitless ego-massaging witty compliments from clever, funny liberals. Now they land in the less than hundreds, accompanied by AI images of Trump as a Marvel superhero firing a bazooka of justice at some Mexican peasants. Cry liberal tears, muesli boy!
Everyone I used to look at on Twitter, currently X, has gone elsewhere, except for my racist auntie, a man who paints pictures of moss, and the eternally youthful 70s comedy art sex icon Robin Askwith, who just can’t seem to extract himself from the Liz Fraser foaming bathtub of Musk’s echo chamber of hate.
Musk is open in his contempt for Keir Starmer, but also vocal in his support of the far-right fraudster Tommy Robinson, having promoted his discredited racist documentary Silenced to 200 million of his followers, who view it as some kind of tablet of law, dragged breathlessly down from the mountaintop by a man made of unrefrigerated sausages with a perpetually runny nose and an imminently exploding forehead.
But by all means, let the British parliament allow Musk to buy his pets into power while our leaders stand around trading witty barbs about steak lunches and tuna sandwiches, the useless twats – Nero laughing at someone’s Greggs order as Rome burns and is rebuilt in the shape of a million revolving swastikas.
I’m calling it. This Farage-Musk-Candy photo op marks the death of British democracy. And there’s nothing we can do about it. Prepare for fascism-lite in Farage’s future UK and get out while you still can. Oh! But you can’t. Thanks to Brexit. That must have been one of the many Brexit benefits Kemi Badenoch was talking about in PMQs last Wednesday. That and not being able to afford the postage for formerly cheap old Serge Gainsbourg 7in singles from French secondhand record dealers.
Don’t believe me? Look at how I am always right. Over and over again. In 2025, my 15-year old standup routine about how Russell Brand was a sleazy creep is looking evermore prescient. And three weeks ago, I’d just had a massive £6,000 prop of Gregg Wallace made for my new standup show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, which rapidly unfolding events rendered more resonant five days before opening night.
Sometimes, like Richard Burton waking each morning in The Medusa Touch to news reports of mass death and destruction that he feels his own dreams are causing, I worry that the worst imaginings of my most cynical standup routines are somehow being recast as reality by malevolent Lovecraftian squid gods, hellbent on the destruction of human civilisation. Did I cause all this to happen? Kill me. Kill me now. Save your society! Save yourselves! I am doing this! Me!
Carole “Cat Woman” Cadwalladr correctly showed us how social media was covertly and systematically weaponised during the Brexit campaign, and was ridiculed for it by a man with used cat litter for hair. Like John Lennon said: “A very merry Christmas and a happy new year. Let’s hope it’s the first one without Andrew Neil.”
But unlike the clients of Cambridge Analytica, Musk doesn’t even need to hide what he is doing. I think Musk will use his unlimited wealth and all-pervasive cyber-influence to install Farage at the head of some Tory-Reform hybrid opposition party, remove the current government and have his way with our country over an Aga like a jodhpurred male lead in a Disney+ Jilly Cooper adaptation. And I think Farage will be our leader by the end of the decade, booze and fags notwithstanding.
Because Musk is part of the incoming American presidency, Starmer seems to think he has to accept this open collusion, this direct attempt by a foreign power to interfere in the functions of our democracy, as business as usual. We seem to be unduly upset that Prince Andrew, a man who makes the phrase “loose cannon” seem unfair on insecurely fastened antique weaponry, has been a fool to befriend a possible Chinese spy, whose presumed paymasters wish us ill. But here’s Farage, scrabbling about on his knees before Musk behind the bus station downtown in a hail of loose ha’pennies, and our politicians just stand around like spare princes at a Jeffrey Epstein cocktail sausage party.
The Washington Post’s slogan, irrelevant since Jeff Bezos bought the paper, was: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Well, democracy is dying here in plain sight. Merry Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last.
Stewart Lee tours Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf next year, with a Royal Festival Hall run in July. He is also a guest of all-female Fall karaoke act the Fallen Women, at the Lexington, London, on 28 December
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