Hey-ho! It’s that time of year again when the opaquely funded Tufton Street-linked pressure group Restore Trust expends expensive effort seeding its right-leaning candidates (formerly including the evangelical Stephen Green, who denied the existence of marital rape and once supported Uganda’s death penalty for some homosexuals) on to the board of its hated “woke” National Trust. What do Restore Trust’s unnamed backers want? The National Trust’s land? Its coastlines? Its artworks? Or are they as annoyed as me that it’s increasingly difficult to buy commemorative thimbles in the gift shops?
National Trust supporters combat masses of inexplicably blue-ticked social media accounts, with names full of numbers, pushing the Restore Trust narrative in idiomatically odd language riddled with strange spelling mistakes. (The democratic process is apparently “manipulated by the encumbant. Because the encumbant doesn’t like the opposition.”) The Washington Post proved that Russia deploys social media voices to shape discourse and create division. Is it Vladimir Putin, ultimately, who covets the National Trust’s delicious vegan scone recipes, despite them having been made with woke margarine for some years?
Whatever! It is beholden to you to get online as soon as possible, join the National Trust if you haven’t already and follow the board’s block vote advice in the forthcoming AGM to protect our national heritage and natural assets from appropriation by the private limited company Restore Trust and its anonymous funders under false pretences. Take back control! But this stuff is everywhere.
Despite regime change, the bent-over backwards and beaten black and blue BBC remains a mouthpiece for rightwing talking points, this month amplifying the views of the Tufton Street-based TaxPayers’ Alliance, founded by Vote Leave’s Matthew Elliott, who was made a baron by Liz Truss in a final act of gratuitous violence against the British body politic she had already strangled into unconsciousness.
The BBC explained how Tufton Street’s TaxPayers’ Alliance said bankrupt Birmingham should sell off the city’s artworks, even though they are held in trust and are the best thing in Birmingham after the grave of one of the shortest women who ever lived (Nanette Stocker – 83.82cm, or 2.75ft). Why not sell her corpse off while we’re at it? I’m sure the fabulous Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities in Hackney, east London, could find her a tasteful corner next to the Rolling Stones’ used condoms. Or perhaps the surviving members of UB40 could be hired out to the city’s creditors as sexual playthings.
Public art galleries in Britain are in a sorry enough state as it is. When I last visited Peterborough art gallery in 2020, it was then managed by the fitness company Vivacity. Works by Alan Davie, Julian Trevelyan and Patrick Heron shone unseen, and a wild boar sculpture by the mighty Elisabeth Frink was used to prop up mops in a corner, perhaps the ultimate expression of William Morris’s dictate that art should be both beautiful and useful.
But who do the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s backers want Birmingham’s art sold to? What good to us is John Everett Millais’s The Blind Girl holding its value in the private lobby of a bank HQ, unadmired by the monied? Should Ford Madox Brown’s epochal The Last of England languish unloved as a company asset in the vault of a distant oligarch? I suppose, like good right-thinkers, we should let the market decide.
The problem for comedians and columnists in trying to “find the funny” in the new government is that the evils of the last one, and its attendant claque of mysteriously funded thinktanks and accommodating journalists – Tufton Street and Laura Kuenssberg’s supine BBC News, for example – still poison everything. My attempts to initiate a comedy critique of one-tier Keir on stage at a big outdoor standup festival last Sunday night in Manchester were met with silence, so I moved on to making fun of a moth that had flown on to the stage instead, which was tragically more interesting than Starmer. Ultimately, artists too must let the market decide.
Which brings us neatly to the Oasis scandal, where ordinary bucket hat folk are fleeced for £355 for already obscene £135 tickets, another Conservative crime. Tory MP David Davis, the least dislikable of the now discredited Brexit dickheads, criticised the dynamic pricing of Ticketmaster, which has basically become its own touts, so I wrote to him, two weeks ago, asking why he didn’t speak out against the Tories’ encouragement of ticket price hikes years ago. His chief of staff said he’d reply. He hasn’t. But we remember.
Challenged in parliament on ticketing price hikes in 2011, the future Conservative culture secretary Sajid Javid said those selling secondary tickets were “classic entrepreneurs” and those complaining were “chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living as a middleman”. To Tories, art and nature are just opportunities to make money. And that’s all. They even stood by as publicly subsidised tickets for publicly subsidised venues were resold at prohibitive prices, ignoring the all-party parliamentary group on ticket abuse. But Oasis fans aren’t chattering middle-class champagne socialists. The Tories’ toxic legacy, from prisons to sewage to ticketing, has finally become too big to ignore, but those responsible have fled the scene.
I would love to be making fun of Labour, particularly its failure to address the imprisonment of environmental protesters. But it would be like ridiculing Hercules for trying to sluice the Augean stables clean of 14 years of accumulated Tory shit.
In other news, the former batshit banjo player from Mumford & Sons’s GB News-funding dad, Paul Marshall, just bought the skeletal remains of the Spectator. Don’t expect the flow of insidious disinformation and inflammatory opinion, now under the banner of a once credible legacy title, to abate any time soon. Kicking out the Tories might have cut off the Hydra’s head, but the tentacles of Tufton Street, Marshall and the Brexit battalion still writhe.
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on the streaming service Now and his 2025 tour Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf begins at London’s Leicester Square theatre in December
