Writing in the Daily Mail in January 2024, after Donald Trump was elected for the second time, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Dog-Whistle Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ 88%-lies Get-Brexit-Done Bung-a-Bob-for-Big-Ben’s-Bongs Cocaine-Event Spiritual-Worth Three-Men-and-a-Dog Whatever-It-Takes I-Shook-Hands-With-Everyone Herd-Immunity I-Want-to-Thank-Po-Ling Squash-the-Sombrero Johnson expressed his delight that “the global wokerati are trembling so violently you can hear the ice tinkling in their negronis”. Fragments of Johnson’s non-think piece still float free on the internet, like lumps of excrement bobbing in an already polluted river, nonetheless remarkable in the sheer scale of their wrongness.
“I simply cannot believe that Trump will ditch the Ukrainians,” continued Johnson only two years ago, a politician blessed with an almost incalculable lack of vision, Cassandra’s unemployable idiot brother, the Oracle of Dopey, the one-man equivalent of the three prophetic Graeae sisters of the Greek myths Johnson was doubtless expensively schooled in, but without even one tooth or eye between them, a cluster of insentient, incommunicable meat, a pulsating absence of ideas, a mental cyst.
“On the contrary, having worked out, as he surely has, that there is no deal to be done with Putin,” Johnson guffed on the Daily Mail’s clock, “I reckon there is a good chance that Trump will double down and finish what he started — by giving the Ukrainians what they need to win. If that is the case, then there is every chance, under Trump, that the west will be stronger, and the world more stable.” More stable? I have never felt more afraid. And if you aren’t afraid you aren’t paying attention. Anyone who isn’t in a state of constant sphincter-dilating anxiety needs to go and see their GP to find out what is wrong with them. I prescribe a bottle of wine a night, the first Napalm Death album and occasional interaction with an ignorantly contented pet.
As an 80s teenager, sudden noises would wake me with a start every night, as I imagined The Bomb had finally gone off, just like the Specials, the Sound, Barry Hines, 2000 AD and the Dead Kennedys told me it would. But this will not be like that. It will be more subtle. Why waste a nuclear bomb when you have Nigel Farage, Joe Rogan, Tommy Robinson and the whole of the tech-bro-directed internet to do your Russia-rehabilitating work for you? When Putin pushes into Poland, will these click-hunting quislings still be talking about poking the bear?
Take that, the north London liberal intelligentsia! That will teach you to enjoy Saoirse Ronan and James McArdle starring in Yael Farber’s kill-for-a-ticket production of Macbeth at the Almeida theatre in 2021
I hope those that voted for Boris Johnson because they thought it would be a laugh and annoy woke liberals are still laughing, as Trump has now sided with Putin against Ukraine and allows his missiles to strafe Kyiv undetected, killing toddlers in parks in their pushchairs. Nothing schools the wokerati more than the murder of infants, eh Boris? Take that, the north London liberal intelligentsia, and I hope it makes you choke on your tofu and avocado mung bean non-binary blah blah blah blah fuck off fuck off fuck off! That will teach you to enjoy Saoirse Ronan and James McArdle starring in Yael Farber’s kill-for-a-ticket production of Macbeth at the Almeida theatre in 2021.
Johnson’s celebratory 2024 Trump election-victory column has now been put behind the Daily Mail’s paywall. In the vast back catalogue of profitably and cynically manufactured faux-outrage and tiny pictures of Sarah Vine’s face, it must presumably be one of the Mail’s most monetisable hits, the Last Christmas of confirmation bias. And the fact that Johnson’s words have been proven by time to be inherently evil and objectively wrong is no reason to stop wringing revenue out of them, especially when the paper needs to recoup the reported six-figure sum it pays the objectively discredited Johnson to burp out his journalistic mouth farts, like an eructatious bulldog that has eaten the irresponsibly discarded soiled nappy of a neighbour’s diarrhetic child.
Right now, various televisual content owners will be examining their own morality and wondering if they need to wrangle Russell Brand guest spots out of their back catalogues. But Boris Johnson’s unexamined celebration of Donald Trump is still coining it in for the Daily Mail, as the abandoned Ukrainians bury their dead, collateral damage in the impotent mating dance Boris Johnson’s beloved woke-baiting Trump performs before the indifferent and implacable Putin. If Trump was your friend, pathetically trying to impress a potential partner you knew would only use him and break his heart, you would do the decent thing, and lean in close, and whisper: “No chance, mate. Go home.”
It’s surprising that Johnson got it so wrong about Russia. After all, he ditched his security detail to attend a KGB spook’s party in Italy in April 2018. You’d think he’d be better informed. Why is Boris Johnson still a thing? When cats know they have outlived their usefulness they have the dignity to take themselves off to die. It can only be the arrogance instilled in Johnson by an Etonian education that has prevented him from just shambling off, lying down in the middle of a road, and praying to be absolved of his guilt. Tube train drivers who inadvertently facilitate the suicides of platform jumpers are tortured by their sense of complicity. But I think the driver that ran over the finally self-aware Boris Johnson would probably find the inner resources to cope, forgive themselves and move forward.
I’m trying to find the funny here, but it is a tragedy that those who had Trump’s card marked from the start were dismissed by people like Boris Johnson as victims of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, and yet now we are where we are. In December last year, and this fact cannot be stated enough, America openly declared that its foreign policy was committed to destabilising and ultimately removing democratically elected liberal or left-leaning European governments; this month someone, either Trump or his facilitator Elon Musk – who has been paying Tommy Robinson’s legal bills, remember – restricted Ukraine’s access to the Starlink satellite system that provides their missile defence shield, to allow Putin, with whom Trump now openly aligns himself as if he had been a Russian asset all along, free punches at the country. America has declared its intent to destabilise our European democracies. And the tech-bro loyalists that court Trump could shut down our communication systems, our payment systems and our ability to order deluxe Blu-ray editions of obscure European art films on Amazon in an instant. This would really stick it to the north London liberal wokerati in a way Boris Johnson could previously only have dreamed of.
The same Trump Derangement Syndrome twats are ridiculing the government’s cautious announcement that we should stock up on batteries and bottled water, bringing us into line with the domestic preparedness advice of countries closer to the northern European frontline of what we must now realistically recognise as a Russian-American alliance that has quietly agreed we are an inconvenience to its proposed future spheres of influence.
For years, commentators have speculated that Putin must have sexual kompromat on Trump to have made the president of the US so compliant. I hope it’s really good kompromat. I will be disappointed if European liberal democracy goes down just because, somewhere, supposedly, there’s a film of two Moscow prostitutes peeing on a bed in which a former president of America and his wife had slept. If everything we know is going to hell, at least let there be dogs involved, hedgehogs, limbless hermaphrodites and rent boys dressed as Christ.
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.
Stewart’s new book, Pea Green Boat, is available now, and so is a DVD of his last live show, Basic Lee.
And he is supporting the singer-songwriter John Smith, performing Pea Green Boat with him, at St Pancras Old Church, London, on 25 and 26 November