A female black rod has declared the wokest parliament ever open! Allow yourselves the luxury of hope. But while you must remember the poor, and the polluted rivers and those marooned on massive hospital waiting lists, you must also, at this time, think of the satirists. For we are the real victims here. The gift horse just shut its mouth, shut the stable door and bolted. Maybe Nadhim Zahawi forgot to turn the understable heating on.
This is the first supposedly funny broadsheet column I have written under a Labour government. And it is already not very funny at all. Reading it must feel like watching air escape slowly from a punctured balloon. Pffffft! Come back, Jonathan Gullis. The church of hell is missing its chief gargoyle. Come back, Gillian Keegan, for you did a fucking good job, actually. Come back, Andrew Selous, former MP for South West Bedfordshire, whoever you were. And come back, Grant Shapps. Come back, Michael Green. Come back, Sebastian Fox. Come back, Corinne Stockheath. Come back, all the different online identities of Grant “Lawnmower” Shapps that made him four times as funny as a normal Tory. We need you! Especially Corinne Stockheath.
Before Brexit, I never really wrote that much political comedy. I talked about dogs playing the piano and small towns with swearwords in their names. For two years in the 1990s, I pretended to be a pedantic crow. Once, I dressed as Godzilla and attacked a giant lobster with a shopping bag. The defeated bad news patsy James Cleverly, for example, remembered those times fondly, having written on Twitter that he “liked Stewart Lee a lot better when he was funny”. I, in turn, remember Cleverly when he used to be in government, but those days are now just a Rohypnol haze.
As a fully paid-up member of the tofu-munching metropolitan liberal elite wokerati, last weekend I attended two literary events; one in a stately home near Totnes, where I was given malbec wine by the singer from the doom metal band 40 Watt Sun; and the other at a stately home in Hampstead, where I enjoyed a fish sandwich made by the man who played Andolini in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova. It was just another day in my fantastic life! A fantastic life!!
At both events were delegates like me, who have made our livings this last decade or so mocking the increasingly absurd and relentlessly rotten Conservative government. The Conservatives and the ridiculous campaign to leave Europe had radicalised me as a comedian, as much as any centrist dad can be radicalised. I became ruddy furious and various people started to get a right telling off. But suddenly our gravy train has hit the buffers, the wrong kind of gravy is all over the tracks, the buffet car has run out of cheap laughs and I am sitting next to a table of sensible people with reasonable ideas. Bollocks!
I hope I was always funnier than I was angry these last 14 years. Sometimes, despair got the better of me. I apologise. But as I survey the gaping laptop this Tuesday morning, I could benefit from some of the fury that formerly fuelled me. Could someone in power say something unambiguously racist again, please, or blatantly lie, or filter millions of pounds of public money to fathers-in-law, pub landlords and pole dancers. My head welcomes dull conscientious competence. My heart longs for the ludicrous, like the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg clearly longed for Boris Johnson. (Are we allowed to say that yet?) We satirists never had it so good! What next?
On 28 April, I filmed one of the final performances of my last standup show, Basic Lee, in Salford, for subsequent broadcast on Sky and Now. Then I began work on the new standup show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, which opens in December. But less than a month later, Rishi Sunak called a snap general election and the 10 minutes or so I had on the Tories in Basic Lee became the last political jokes I wrote under a Conservative administration, hopefully ever.
When the show goes out on Sky for the first time on Saturday 20 July, it will seem unbelievable, for example, that the former environment secretary Steve Barclay was married to an executive from super-polluter Anglian Water. To me! To you! Surely it was a conflict of interests of some magnitude.
And was Barclay’s already forgotten predecessor Thérèse Coffey once entrusted with the futures of millions of British mammals and invertebrates, surely her natural prey? And had there really been a tiny man called Rishi Sunak who flew everywhere in a jet, eating Haribo ™ ® from his pocket, and who had once tried to insert his credit card directly into a baffled garage cashier’s mouth?
Tuesday’s first session of parliament saw all party leaders make uncharacteristically good-natured opening remarks, leaving me little to work with. While Cat Smith spoke, the Labour MP Barry Gardiner’s phone went off live on TV. I wondered if it was another alleged Chinese secret agent trying to get work experience for her son in his constituency office and thought there may be a funny paragraph in the idea. But though Gardiner is somewhat buffoonish, he isn’t inherently evil, like most of the last crop of Tories, and it seemed cruel to make a fool of a man who is quite capable of making a fool of himself unassisted.
There was a brief burst of ill-timed point-scoring from a predictably tin-eared Nigel Farage, who came off like a British tourist taking a piss in the corner of a cathedral, but all his comments showed was how quickly his one-trick street-corner cup-and-ball act is going to wither under the bright lights of parliamentary scrutiny. So where do the next four years of the funny come from? The page is blank. The luxury of not knowing is exhilarating. Thank God.
• Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on Sky Comedy on 20 July at 9pm and subsequently the streaming service Now
