I opened my new standup show, Basic Lee, 14 days after Liz Truss took office. Do you remember her? The cheese one? I joked to the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati in attendance at the Leicester Square theatre that there was little point in pursuing my usual practice of tying a personal story into the contemporary political one, as the new Liz Truss government would certainly not last until the tour ended in April 2024. Perhaps it wouldn’t even last to the end of that night’s two-hour show. Accordingly, I read my opening 15 minutes of material on Truss and her cabinet off flimsy cards, explaining there was no point in learning it. How we laughed! And how the world laughs at us.
On a Thursday less than two weeks later, in between my leaving home and arriving at the Leicester Square theatre, the thuggish chancellor of the exchequer became the first dim domino to fall and my tight five on Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget bit the dust. As I rolled it out for one last time to an audience of Anti-Growth Coalition members cackling at the impossibility of my job, I felt like the neolithic fisherman of standup, trying to spear the salmon of slippery political targets in the fast-moving, and inevitably sewage-filled, chalk stream of the Conservatives’ collapse. Pity the refugee! Pity the pensioner!! But above all, in these dark times, pity the professional satirist!!!
