Andy Burnham was once the cheery mayor of dress-down Friday; a grand master of the achievable aim whom your sister’s friend fancied; in his trousers; in his shirt; with his hair; in Manchester.
But now Andy Burnham walks towards the poisoned door of Downing Street, and his inevitable mauling in the maws of the rightwing press and the evil-billionaire-owned world of social media, with the naive optimism of the self-styled bear-whisperer Timothy Treadwell, who imagined he could befriend grizzlies, but obviously couldn’t, and whose half-eaten remains were eventually found partially buried in a mound of twigs, soil and delusions. His last recorded words? “Come out here! I’m being killed out here!”
Who should get to choose the prime minister of Britain? White-supremacist virtual-child-porn facilitator Elon Musk of Twitter (currently X)? The Daily Mail’s non-domiciled freeman-of-the-City-of-London non-London citizen Viscount Rothermere? Or Putin’s Russian propaganda bots, disguised as a succession of concerned everyday British racists? Because they certainly all have had significant say in shifting the easily oiled dial of public opinion.
Or should it be Donald Trump’s black ops propagandists, determined to destabilise European liberal democracies and pretend London is a Mad Max dystopia of burning cars and conical bras, and his accompanying $12m donations to influencers like the free speech champion Toby Young, who last time I checked had a problem with the provision of wheelchair ramps in schools?
Or should it be those much mythologised or alternatively demonised Labour party members, taking a moment out from exercising their whippets or frothing their non-dairy north London tofu cappuccinos (delete as applicable), that choose the next Labour prime minister alone? Or should it be the unions, like the train drivers’ champions Aslef? Toot if you love Brexit!
Or should it be, preferably, a drunk newly enfranchised teenage voter playing spin the bottle with 750ml of Smirnoff ™ ®, a skunkweed doobie ™® in one hand and a mobile phone in the other, ready to upload the leadership result for likes? One thing’s for certain. The last people who got asked were you and I.
Do you already hate Andy Burnham? At the time of going to press it’s unclear which way Andy “Burn Them!” Burnham will jump regarding North Sea oil drilling licences, the abandonment of net zero commitments, and the death of all life on Earth in exchange for short-term political gain, but I am prepared to be disappointed and take another 10-year leave of absence from ever voting Labour. Of all the contrived culture war red herrings, North Sea oil is so red it’s virtually a red mullet, and I suspect even Kemi Badenoch secretly knows that, despite her famed indifference to the specifics of different fish species.
Incontrovertible evidence of our imminent doom isn’t really what commissioners are looking for at the moment. Perhaps if Romesh Ranganathan were to host it?
Do people that want the drilling to start again to encourage industry and ease our energy bills know that …
1. Oil and gas prices here are largely determined by international markets, so increased UK oil output would make minimal difference domestically. We’re not guaranteed access to the oil that is drilled out anyway. It’s in our sea but it isn’t ours. In that respect, North Sea oil is like all those Russian submarines with internet cable clippers attached to their hulls.
2. Investing in renewables is guaranteed to reduce bills in a way drilling for oil in UK waters won’t, so anyone arguing for oil against renewables is wrong. And a windfarm is less unsightly, even to Donald Trump presumably, than the sight of millions of people crawling in the dirt and crying for water as their eyes melt.
3. Margaret Thatcher sold off all the oil drilling rights to multinational companies in 1982 so profits from oil drilling won’t reach the UK anyway. Take back control!
4. Arguments that UK tax revenue from foreign drillers will help us are on shaky ground because big oil companies are so very good at avoiding paying UK tax. Shell didn’t pay any UK tax from 2017 to 2023. You can be sure of Shell.
5. All the above are irrelevant anyway because even if we stopped extracting fossil fuels now it’s probably too late to avoid the climatic catastrophe fossil-fuel use is driving, and so human civilisation as we know it, most major ecosystems, and all long-running Netflix docudrama series about serial killers, will be over by the end of the century.
Climate change is now at the stage, to quote a much-posted meme, where it is moving from manifesting itself as a series of disasters viewed through footage on phones to being something that gets closer and closer to where you live, until finally you’re the one filming it. A good example of this would be the apocalyptic wildfire that rampaged across Arthur’s Seat, a city centre royal park in Edinburgh, in the early stages of this week. According to legend, King Arthur and his knights sleep in a cave until they are needed in a moment of national crisis. Well, lads, now might be a good moment to consider stirring your, admittedly charred, chivalric arses.
Maybe if the Edinburgh inferno kicks off again next month, when the media corps are in attendance for the Edinburgh festival, a climate-driven disaster in a British capital city might make a bigger impact. But good luck getting all those TV arseholes to look up from their phones, notice the beginning of the end of civilisation, and film it. Besides which, incontrovertible evidence of our imminent doom isn’t really what we find commissioners are looking for at the moment. Perhaps if Romesh Ranganathan were to host it?
If you accept the literal truth of all the above statements and still want to open up the North Sea for drilling, you are either evil or a moron or, in the case of North Sea oil drilling’s biggest fan, Donald Trump, both.
For years, sylvan acquaintances have been trying to persuade me to join them living in the Forest of Dean, and it’s an attractive proposition, as the gradually gentrified former open-cast mine and woodland now boasts both a delicatessen and a collectors’ record shop. But in these combustible end times? You want me to live in a dense forest full of wooden trees? One may as well set up camp in a flammable tent on a garage forecourt and deliberately develop a 60-a-day smoking habit and a tendency to discard still-smouldering matches without due care.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced. Stewart is doing a short set at the Deer Shed festival in Baldersby Park, North Yorkshire, and hosting a Q&A with the Nottinghamshire rap group Sleaford Mods, on Saturday 25 July. And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around his forthcoming book, Pea Green Boat, at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October