A man with an outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant against him for alleged war crimes and alleged crimes against humanity, and an adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster who hates wind and low water pressure but loves pussy and KFC, have launched an illegal invasion of Iran. And many Iranians are so disappointed in their current rulers they have welcomed it, which is a bit like letting some bears into your house in the hope that they will scare away a dog.
Our own prime minister’s uncharacteristically correct decision not to actively participate in Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal war has seen him criticised by Nigel Farage, whose most admired world leader is Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, loads of Reform-adjacent millionaires, who moved to the newly vulnerable Dubai to avoid tax and rain, expect to be flown home to safety by a country to which they contribute nothing. Hasn’t the bloke who owns Pimlico Plumbers got a fleet of white vans he can send out to pick them up?
Under the command of Pete Hegseth, the American secretary of war (formerly the secretary of defence), whose body is covered in tattoos associated with white supremacist and Christian nationalist causes, American troops have been told the war against Iran is “all part of God’s divine plan” and that “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth”. To be honest, I preferred Jesus when he just healed lepers, made a small amount of fish feed more people than it might reasonably have been expected to, and had his feet washed by prostitutes. But they say everyone gets more rightwing as they get older.
Oddly, the idea that Trump “has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth” is somehow more comforting than the alternative, namely that Trump is leading us into Armageddon by accident because he has no plan and is lurching from one massive world-shaking gesture to another, perhaps in an attempt to avoid coverage of his many appearances in a set of still largely suppressed files that suggest the world is run by cabal of paedophile financiers and techlords.
I needed a break from the constant mental torture of the news, so I went to King’s Cross to see the reformed 90s indie-pop band Heavenly, whose lead singer, Amelia Fletcher, has both a CBE and an OBE for services to economics. Whatever anyone says, this is much cooler than Vanilla Ice having both a kangaroo and a goat.
Heavenly have been reinvigorated by young people discovering their 1993 single P.U.N.K. Girl on an internet called Tick-Tock, which reduces often complex nuanced songs to short misrepresentative clips of only a few seconds, meaning relatively sophisticated songwriters are able to enjoy sudden flurries of belated commercial success in today’s attention-resistant marketplace by seeming to be less clever than they are.
Heavenly have risen to the challenge of their late-life rediscovery by writing a new set that reflects their suddenly sexagenarian existence, full of spider plants, Tunnock’s tea cakes and people listening out for the post. On his last album, Marilyn Manson, who is 57 and dresses like an Edwardian crocheted toilet-roll doll, sang about being eaten by some worms and then denied that he was a piece of taxidermy. I do not think Marilyn Manson has really given middle age and what it means any serious thought.
Look back in nostalgic 90s fondness at how George Bush at least felt obliged to concoct a story to justify invading Iraq
Delightfully, Heavenly’s current range of tour merchandise includes Heavenly branded bicycle bells. I bought one, but within hours it had been stolen off my bike while I was buying some onions in Sainsbury’s, another example of how life is a daily struggle against crime here in Sadiq Khan’s lawless Londonistan.
Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X), Vice-President JW Vance, British commentators on the right, swarms of Russian bots, and the jokes in adverts for the funnyman Ricky Gervais’s Dutch Barn vodka brand, do their best to consolidate the demonstrably false idea that London is a dangerous hell-hole where crime rages out of control, my bicycle bell a case in point.
Indeed, in a petulant outburst after Starmer denied him the right to fight his illegal war from British bases, Trump himself declared, apropos of nothing, “but the UK, what they’re doing with [windfarms] and what they’re doing with immigration is horrible. And you have a terrible mayor of London. A terrible mayor. An incompetent guy. And you have Sharia courts.” I would have more respect for Trump if he, like Ricky Gervais, was just lying about London to sell vodka.
But why is the Orange Oligarch saying these things? I wondered if, somewhere along the line, the current American administration are quietly engineering reasons to carry out regime change here in the UK and Europe generally, should it suit their purposes. It seemed to have passed without significant comment in the rightwing press here, or “the press”, as it is known, when in December Trump’s US National Security Strategy made explicit its intent to fund far-right groups in Europe to protect “freedom of speech” and prevent “civilisational erasure” by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
Then I realised I was overthinking it. Trump doesn’t need a reason. Watch Channel 4’s Tony Blair series and look back in nostalgic 90s fondness at how George Bush at least felt obliged to concoct a story of weapons of mass destruction to justify invading Iraq. Trump’s reasons for attacking Iran, and his hopes for what it will achieve, just change every hour. I miss the good old days when American politicians at least made the effort to maintain a consistent lie.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, and Stewart will be opening for Scottish punk pioneers the Skids on 14 March in Portmeirion as part of the band’s Absolute Weekend