One Monday in March 2020, Joe Lycett got a call inviting him to go on live TV to explain why he’d recently changed his name by deed poll to Hugo Boss. Long story short, he’d done it to challenge the brand’s heavy-handed use of cease and desist letters, and it was a typically Lycettian stunt, Robin Hooding the rich with humour and a small amount of rage. It was one of his rare days off, when he wasn’t filming a Channel 4 show or on a standup tour. Which meant that, when he got the call, Lycett was doing his unofficial weekend job, caring for a friend who was dying of bowel cancer. “I said, ‘They want me on the Victoria Derbyshire programme in an hour.’ And he was sat next to me in the bed like, ‘Well, off you go then!’ He loved it. All the carnage I create.”
So his friend would’ve loved what happened two years later. “I go for a swim with my mum once a week,” he says, taking a delicate swig of coffee. “And she normally takes a bit longer to come out, so while I was waiting I posted a made-up Sue Gray report on Twitter. I found the Cabinet Office logo and put it together as a little image on my phone.” It was the end of January 2022 and partygate was raging. Which was why it wasn’t a huge surprise when he got a message from someone who works in Parliament to say it had been read as a serious leak, that MPs were visibly panicking.
