I was extremely surprised last week to learn that the Tory chair, Nadhim Zahawi, who famously used public money to warm the stables of his chilly horses, had finally tasted the fist of justice. Last year, Zahawi said: “I’ve always declared my financial interests and paid my taxes in the UK.” In fact, it seems, Zahawi has had to cough up millions of pounds he owed in tax after a dispute with HMRC over an offshore family trust. Last week, his spokesperson said of his boss: “He is proud to have built a British business that has become successful around the world.” The spokesperson said this when asked whether Zahawi was paying millions to HM Revenue and Customs. The answer is the answer to a different question, a British question admittedly, but one that was not asked.
When asked a question, politicians, you can’t just say any words as a reply. There has to be some relationship. Is it any wonder examination standards declined so sharply when Zahawi was education secretary. “Explain how Adolf Hitler justified the annexation of the Sudetenland.” “Sartana is coming so trade your pistols for a coffin.” Will that do?
As well as being chair of the Conservative party, Zahawi is also currently the minister without portfolio. But maybe he is confused about that too. Maybe he’s got shitloads of portfolios, with portfolios coming out of his arse, but maybe they’re all hidden in the Zahawi family trust in Gibraltar. From now on, Zahawi must be referred to as the minister who claims to have no portfolios.
Like the tax coffers that suffered so terribly at the hands of cruel Zahawi, I personally have been the victim of many indignities: three muggings, the theft of four bikes, one phone, numerous car radios and the T-shirt from Nirvana’s first British tour, massive identity fraud and losing the 2014 British comedy award for best entertainment programme to Graham Norton. And, as is so often the case, none of the perpetrators has ever been brought to justice. Indeed, Norton’s career has continued to flourish, as he shamelessly parades the injustice in public. Most wrongdoers are left unpunished.
For example, on Tuesday I saw some men fighting in the street by a Victorian beam engine north of Finsbury Park, so I of course got out of the car and tried to get involved. As a “so-called” standup “comedian” and “funny” columnist, I need a constant stream of extreme experiences to fuel the furnaces of my material, so I always throw myself into difficult scenes under the pretence of trying to help, often making the situations worse quite deliberately. Indeed, the recent damage to the central section of Exmoor’s bronze age clapper bridge Tarr Steps was as a result of a suggestion I made to some men arguing in a Premier Inn upstream about whether the lifesize model of Lenny Henry in reception would float.
And last year I exacerbated a physical altercation in a square north of Oxford Street by pretending I thought the two men involved were doing some kind of folk dance and then trying to join in. I realised, to my shame, that I was being observed by the bewildered standup comedian Jamali Maddix, who was sitting outside a cafe nearby. I went over to him and said: “We all do that, don’t we, Jamali Maddix? Get involved in stuff to see if you get some material out of it?” He said he didn’t and looked confused and worried.
By the beam engine some men in cheap red tracksuits were restraining a small man, and one of them had punched him in the face. When I approached, one of the tracksuit men stopped his friend punching the small man, explained that they were delivery drivers, that they thought the small man had been trying to remove stuff from their van, and that the police had been called. In the excitement the small man wriggled free and ran away through six lanes of traffic, chased by the tracksuit men, whom he swiftly evaded. Later on I saw him lying on a bench in Finsbury Park. I asked him why he had fled the scene and he said he “was proud to have built a British business that has become successful around the Tottenham area” and that he considered the matter closed.
Of course, the light that has been shone on Zahawi’s doings will make no difference. Not long ago, it would have been a resignation matter, but the bar of shame has been lowered so significantly by this current incarnation of the Conservative party that it is now obstructing the Mariana Trench. Partying through lockdown? Giving public money to your American mistress? Talking about migrants in terms a Holocaust survivor recognises? Nothing sticks it seems. That’s why it’s so odd that Amazon is finally severing its business relationship with the bants-bearing bulldozer that is Jeremy Clarkson.
Amazon had some kind of ethical standards all along it seemed, it’s just that they didn’t extend to workers’ rights, tax payment, packaging policies and competition. At least that rude old man is gone, sacked for creating, albeit at the Sun in this instance, exactly the kind of Clarkson-style content the content-platform signed Clarkson up to create.
But it’s odd, isn’t it? Clarkson is banished from a business that has no moral standards whatsoever and rationalises everything in terms of disrupting the market. But Zahawi continues as chair of the Conservatives, brandishing as few portfolios as he cares to admit to, while working in the heart of government, a place where morality ought to matter more than at Amazon. Yes, we have no portfolios!
Stewart Lee’s shows Snowflake and Tornado are available on BBC iPlayer. Basic Lee tour dates are booking now. Stewart will appear in Stand Up for Ukraine at the Leicester Square theatre, London, on 28 January
