An educated Reform-supporting relative of mine, in their 60s, who voted for Brexit to “get rid of Pakistanis and Indians”, revealed shamefacedly to me that they had believed a Russian-bot-boosted rumour from earlier this year: namely that property belonging to Keir Starmer was set alight last summer by Ukrainian rent boys who he owed money to, which shows how easy it is to fall for this stuff, especially when the juicier the gossip is, the more ad revenue it generates. I’m thinking of inventing a story that my property was set alight by Ukrainian rent boys to see if I can monetise it.
In June, the i paper’s Lizzie Dearden noted that the Keir Starmer rent boy story was being shared on Elon Musk’s child porn and racist propaganda site Twitter, currently X, once every two minutes, but I seem to remember a source I can’t find now – I am not a legitimate news journalist – saying that less than a third of the country knows that the Welsh Reform MEP Bishop Nathan Gill has been jailed for taking Russian cash. Maybe it wasn’t a big story on GB News.
Imagine if Sir Keir did owe money to Ukrainian rent boys? It might almost have made him interesting enough to beat Andy Burnham. The only people Sir Keir owes money to are his local locksmiths, from whom he has ordered two new spare sets of those little security keys that go in sash window barrel fasteners, in case the set he already has were to be lost, and the line discontinued by the manufacturer; a lesson in caution and preparedness we could all learn from in these unpredictable times.
On Wednesday, among a whole raft of new threats to our national security, MI5’s head honcho Sir Ken McCallum told us that we needed to worry about the targeting of teenagers by online propaganda. I think it’s the pensioners we need to worry about. Someone needs to confiscate their phones. And explain to them that, if I show to you, Auntie, that an article you are sharing on Facebook, about how Muslims are destroying western civilisation, is written by an academic who doesn’t exist from a university that doesn’t exist, it’s not enough to then just say to me: “Yes. But I still think it makes some good points.”
If I was Nige Farage, and my former Welsh leader was now doing actual time in an actual prison for accepting actual Russian cash for actual questions, I’d avoid mentioning the Russia issue
It’s been a great week for pointing out elephants in the room. And it turns out there’s so many of them hiding in plain sight, and they’re all so massive, it’s amazing there was room for the nest of tables and the kids’ Nintendos. But it does explain the overwhelming smell of elephant shit that has been stinking the place out for the last decade.
Last Sunday, Andy Burnham broke with the ostrich-head-sand tradition of every prime minister, since and including Boris “I Attended a Former KGB Agent’s Party in Italy Without My Security Detail” Johnson, of not mentioning the fact Russia obviously interfered in the Brexit referendum. Nigel Farage, a man for whom Vladimir Putin is “the politician he admires most”, chose to misunderstand these remarks, saying: “There was no Russian interference, and the Russia hoax has run all the way through this. And I particularly have to mention my friend and supporter Arron Banks, who was severely libelled over this, but in the end, I'm pleased to say, won in the high court.” Nineteen different press freedom organisations declared Banks’s lawsuit a strategic lawsuit against public participation (Slapp) and an abuse of law. And if I was Nige Farage, and my former Welsh leader Bishop Nathan Gill was now doing actual time in an actual prison for accepting actual Russian cash for actual questions, I’d avoid mentioning the issue.
But there’s more ways for Russia to intervene in British politics than by giving money directly to Reform officials, which the prison badge on Bishop Nathan Gill’s day-pyjamas confirms it did. When I was writing ham-fisted, verbose and unfunny satirical columns for the Observer newspaper, it was obvious to me in the run-up to the Brexit referendum that many of the “below the line” comments supposedly placed by members of the public, were, if they concerned Putin or the EU, written in an imperfect English that followed Kremlin talking points, a bit like the questions Reform’s Bishop Nathan Gill MEP asked on behalf of Moscow in exchange for cash in the European parliament.
In the end, as I have explained before, I decided to slip in incomprehensible comments about Putin to see what the Kremlin posters would make of them – like, from June 2015, “Vladimir Putin is a giant prolapsed female worker bee that sucks hot ridicule out of langoustines’ cephalothoraxes”. But I suspect the response – “Russia is very well doing without your Opra Winfrey western pornography and youre decadent music. More likes about Ukraine which was only the size of a biscuit before transexual won” – may have been a witty reader parodying the usual Kremlin comments, complete with second language you’re/your confusion.
No one’s saying Russia rigged the actual vote count. But for decades Putin has been leading the pack in using social media to sow division in the west, with Kremlin-linked accounts often pushing and amplifying opposing points of view simultaneously just to make me fall out with my racist auntie and my rent-boy-believing relative. Farage himself has been the beneficiary of some pretty far-out viral moments, including the not unconvincing AI-faked footage that did the rounds a few months ago of him leaping to his feet on Question Time to have a go at the governor of the Bank of England.
So it’s good that the Russian elephant has been outed. But there’s another invisible elephant that probably needs to be unveiled. Last December, the new US security strategy called for America, whose authoritarian rulers believe Europe is facing “civilisational erasure”, to be “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and praised “the growing influence of patriotic European parties”. Every night at 3am, Trump’s decaying orange fingers post fictitious memes and X-amplified propaganda to billions of accounts worldwide. The elephant is bright. The elephant is orange.
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.
He appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around Pea Green Boat at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October. And he performs Pea Green Boat again with Mariam Rezaei, and John Cage’s Indeterminacy with Steve Beresford and Tania Chen, at Newcastle’s Glasshouse on 26 October