Does anyone remember that scandalous summer of 2023, when fury greeted the fact that the future prime minister Keir Starmer accepted, but did not declare, £698 of free Coldplay tickets? The donor presumably hoped Sir Keir might one day look as favourably on comfort-blanket stadium-indie backwash as Nigel Farage now does on cryptocurrency. I expect Starmer now thinks back to that particular scandal with nostalgic fondness, like an old man contemplating a curling Polaroid of a harmless ex-girlfriend who has since married a Daily Express journalist. If only Starmer had simply accepted a £5m bung off a Thai-based cryptocurrency billionaire instead, he might have got away with it.
Reform spokespeople dismiss Farage’s financial mass misdemeanour on the grounds that it “doesn’t come up on the doorstep”, which is apparently the way we arbitrate morality now. It’s lucky we will no longer have to bother with codes of ethics, or courts, especially as David Lammy is planning to reduce your opportunity to be judged by a jury of your peers. From now on, weighty matters of morality will be decided by a man in a vest standing in a uPVC porch in Ipswich who is worried about Shakira law, Ulez and lesbians.
As I try to write this, in a Leeds hotel room in the small hours of Thursday morning, the Labour government is collapsing around us, and I feel like Buster Keaton, tumbling down a hill in an avalanche, clutching at straws to satirise. Right now, Wes Streeting is in the frame for a leadership bid, but may not be by the time I submit this column at 6pm. He should be discounted anyway simply because he abetted the parasitical takeover of our NHS by the Trump-loyalist tech firm Palantir, the necrotising fasciitis of fascism-lite, who recently published their own Silicon-Valley-totalitarian manifesto for world domination, vampires in charge of a blood bank.
And this week, despite previous assurances to the contrary, it turned out Palantir can connect supposedly anonymised NHS information to actual individuals after all, the sort of fact-farming technique that has seen them offer practical assistance to Trump’s ICE squads in tracking their targets and then accidentally murdering them in the street. Oh well. It will save police time in the long run, I suppose. The sooner these sort of careless killings are carried out, the sooner everyone can get on with the job of denying responsibility for them.
It’s a worry, though. Should you come into conflict with our next prime minister, Nigel Farage, Palantir would surely have no qualms in supplying him with discrediting data from your records. Drug and alcohol problems? Mental health issues? Maybe even having had an abortion might see your card marked, if Farage’s backers in the American Christian right convince him to criminalise women’s reproductive rights like many states in America already have. Because when Donald Trump sneezes, Nigel Farage scoops up the residue, spreads it on a slice of white bread and declares: “Arf! Arf! Now for a feast!”
Wes Streeting’s cockney gangster grandfather consorted with the Krays, but the big-tech-company company his grandson keeps is far worse
Maybe Palantir will help Prime Minister Farage round up all the homosexuals, the security-conscious second-home buyer having just given his full support to a Colchester preacher who describes homosexuality as “an abomination” and says “the sodomites’ home shall be the lake of fire”? At least that lake sounds warm, like that nice lagoon in Iceland. I tried swimming in Cwm Idwal in Snowdonia once and it was so freezing my genitals disappeared inside me like a sumo wrestler’s. If anything, that’s the kind of lake this Pastor Stephen Clayden should be putting homosexuals in to put an end to their mischief! The nice warm one will only encourage them.
Wes Streeting’s cockney gangster grandfather consorted with the Krays, but the big-tech-company company his grandson keeps is far worse. At least the Krays only killed their own and people wot deserved it. Palantir’s AI technology helped Trump blow up an Iranian girls’ school. Which makes stabbing Jack “The Hat” McVitie, wrapping him in an eiderdown and throwing him into the sea off Newhaven look positively lightweight.
But the fact that the Labour party would even entertain the idea of Prime Minister Streeting shows the extent to which they simply do not understand the fight they have on their hands. Look, I hate Keir Starmer as much as the next north-London Nerve-reading champagne socialist, but he simply was neither as rubbish, nor as nakedly corrupt, as the last few Tory prime ministers, who had colossal crimes and cataclysmic catastrophes far greater than any of Keir’s. From David Cameron’s disastrous EU exit to Boris Johnson’s slippery KGB-agent’s-party attendance to Rishi Sunak’s coffer-draining Rwandan concentration camp quagmire, all were glossed over completely or conveniently excused by the rightwing press, or “the press”, as I call it.
Those swiftly disappeared 2015 photos of Peter Mandelson, the paedophile’s pal, celebrating Wes Streeting’s early political success with his protege’s mother in her kitchen, will be all the press need to destroy him, and paint him as one step removed from Jeffrey Epstein, who still causes political death by association from beyond the grave. But not to politicians on the right, it seems. The fact that Steve Bannon worked with Epstein, for whom Brexit was “just the beginning”, to seek advice on funding Bannon and Farage’s far-right European aggregate, The Movement, has passed without comment. It could have been worse, I suppose. Epstein could have advised Farage on how to get free Coldplay tickets.
The entire communications ecosystem is arrayed against whoever has the misfortune to be the Labour leader. The party don’t seem to have fully taken on board that one of the clearly stated foreign policy aims of the current American administration is to bring down liberal European governments, and in the shape of Elon Musk at X Trump has a willing accomplice to amplify the kind of disinformation that will discredit them. If Starmer had any sense he would put at least as much effort into discrediting Musk and X as he has into discrediting the Green party.
Ofcom, meanwhile, seems unable or unwilling to take any action against GB News, a funnel of news filth funded at a loss by rich man with a grudge that is somehow pushed to the front of all my smart-TV news recommendations, and which is able to operate as Reform’s personal guff-trumpet, like a town crier that wanders unbidden into your living room and bellows discredited racist theories at you until you agree to give it some luncheon meat and barrel of Watney’s Party Seven to make it go away.
A recent episode of the News Agents podcast, dealing with the Birmingham council election results, opens with a disorienting montage of people spouting the kind of social-media-spread shit and authentic-sounding GB News bollocks that complicates all political campaigning now, including the accusation that “Jimmy Savile was a close friend” of Keir Starmer. Really? Maybe, at the very least, this will help alter the perception that the prime minister is boring. After all, it’s not like Farage can boast connections to a high-profile paedophile. Oh! Hang on! He actually can, for real. He even beats Starmer on those terms!
But whoever takes over Labour, and whenever they do this, politicians of the centre and the left have to accept that the rules have changed, the bad guys control the dissemination of information, and the problems of perception they face are insurmountable. Labour should parachute in Angela Rayner, despite the obvious gender- and class-based abuse she will endure, much of it now AI-generated on Elon Musk’s X. Because it would be fun to see Nigel Farage losing his temper with a clever, funny woman week after week after week. Maybe the “bad optics” that would create might even “move the dial”, as the strategists say. I hope so. Once Farage takes control, the Trumpian dismantling of traditional checks and balances will begin, and there will be no way back to the liberal democracy we dreamed of.
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 has programmed, and will be appearing in, Up The Anti, a benefit for North London Hunt Saboteurs, at London’s Leicester Square theatre on 6 July, alongside Daniel Fox, Harry Badger, James Gill, Horn Walsh, Sue Jerkins, Shappi Coarse-Angling, Alasdair Bear-Baiting and Stewart Eel.