It transpires that the parents of the Southport killer failed to report his suspicious behaviour and, according to Sir Adrian Fulford, who is the chair of the ongoing investigation into the murders, “if they had done what they morally ought to have”, the tragedy could have been prevented. The killer’s father’s only explanation was that “the love I had for [my son] overrode my good judgment”. Reform’s Robert Jenrick has called for the parents to be investigated and deported. But to where, then, would Robert Jenrick have suggested we should have deported the late Queen Elizabeth II?
Because the late queen’s parental love also caused her to overlook the suspicious behaviour of her son, which he denies, now known only by the sinister single name of “Andrew”, and had she reported him to the police, who knows how many young girls’ suffering could have been spared? Instead, Queen Elizabeth II paid £10m to silence her son’s accuser, Virginia Giuffre, who subsequently took her own life, and whom Prince Andrew claimed never to have met anyway. In the light of Jenrick’s sincere demands, is it now not time to begin the removal of the stain of Queen Elizabeth II from the pages of British history?
It can be done. The necrophiliac paedophile light entertainer and cancer-hospice goalhanger Jimmy Savile, who was arguably more ubiquitous in our lives than the late queen, has been so successfully erased from the pop-cultural archives that his sudden phantasmal appearance, perhaps as the final flicker of a badly edited intro to a YouTube clip of the Buzzcocks on Top of the Pops, is as unexpected as it is sickening, like a rat emerging from a hotel toilet bowl, or the adjudicated sex-offender and convicted fraudster President Donald Trump popping up in the seasonal family fun film Home Alone 2.
Would it, then, be possible to erase the queen from the culture as efficiently as we have the monstrous Savile, so that, when your grandchild stumbles across an old coin in your shed, they have to ask whose forgotten profile it is that adorns it? Jimmy Savile’s £4,000 grave was torn down. Should the same fate now befall London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the statue of the Queen at Antrim Castle Gardens in Northern Ireland, and the footage of Her Majesty parachuting into the London Olympics opening ceremony (an image that now seems especially menacing given the thousands of young people watching in the stadium beneath)?
Jenrick has also demanded whole-life sentences for those involved with grooming girls. According to the current issue of Elle Décor, Andrew, in turn, moved this week into a new home in the grounds of the royal family’s Sandringham estate, the renovation of which alone may have cost a six-figure sum. It seems like it’s one rule for Pakistani minicab drivers from Rotherham, and quite another for blah blah blah rhythm of a joke.
But is the point I am trying to make here funny enough to justify the collateral damage of any distress this piece might cause the victims of the crimes mentioned above, should they stumble across it? I am not sure, but sometimes satire is blunt and brutal, as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal teaches us. That said, it is not for me to compare myself to Swift, despite having been called the modern equivalent of the great Irish satirist in a thoughtful BBC2 documentary called Art That Made Us in 2022, which is still available to see on iPlayer.
Indeed, since I started writing these so-called “funny” columns for the Nerve, I have been more careful to avoid errors of taste and judgment, or the kind of scattershot surrealist incoherence I used to use as a comic device before I quit at the Observer, so as to close down the opportunities available to the sort of time-wasting bad-faith complainants with deep pockets from the Conservative party, the Daily Mail and various Tufton Street outfits who have made often-spurious moans about me in the past. And I wince when I see politicians step on to the linguistic garden rakes that I am still learning, 38 years into this job, to avoid.
One could almost hear the raised-eyebrow relish, like an urban fox seeing an unlocked Lidl chest freezer full of chicken nuggets, with which Tom Swarbrick said the words ‘glutinous snail’
For example, I have met the parliamentary under-secretary of state for nature, Mary Creagh, probably less than half a dozen times. The first was at a bus stop on 20 April 1988, when the mutual friend I was with suggested she accompany us to London there and then to see the cult psychedelic band Opal, formed by deserters from the Dream Syndicate, the Rain Parade and Clay Allison, at the Fulham Greyhound. Creagh was not familiar with the band, which was beyond her ministerial brief, but I wonder if she ever contemplates that she once witnessed the moment David Roback’s fragmenting factions, at their penultimate gig, transformed into future dreampop avatars Mazzy Star, with Ghost Highway, Give You My Lovin’ and their cover of Slapp Happy’s Blue Flower already in the dying band’s set? Superb! Apparently Creagh’s Tory near-counterpart, shadow secretary for the environment Victoria Atkins, who is married to the chairman of the neonicotinoid-toting and environmentally irresponsible company British Sugar, may have seen Toploader sing Dancing in the Moonlight when they were booked for the Conservative party conference three years ago.
It was Mary Creagh’s job last Friday to promote a fantastic new £60m government scheme to try to save threatened native species, presumably from people like Victoria Atkins’s husband, starting with the turtle dove, the diamond-backed spider, the Eurasian oystercatcher, the red-billed chough, and the spectral gastropod the glutinous snail, which had been presumed extinct. One could almost hear the raised-eyebrow relish, like an urban fox seeing an unlocked Lidl chest freezer full of chicken nuggets, with which LBC presenter and former adviser to Theresa May Tom Swarbrick announced the words “glutinous snail” as he cued up Creagh for an interview on Friday of last week. This was going to be like shooting snails in a barrel.
Unlike many commentators on the right, such as Reform’s Matthew “MattGPT” Goodwin, Nigel Farage’s adviser James Orr, and the Spectator’s whizz-gonk editor Michael Gove, LBC’s Tom Swarbrick isn’t known to benefit from the funds of a right-leaning Hungarian thinktank funded by Russian oil money. But he is the kind of person who thinks nothing of normalising Restore Britain’s far-right leader and Reform refugee Rupert Lowe by getting him on for a hail-fellow-well-met-type chinwaggeroo about the British pub crisis without mentioning his support for the death penalty, and his calls to defund the BBC, ban the burka, carry out a programme of mass deportation and “carpet bomb the cancer of wokery”.
Creagh’s interview soon floundered. “I don’t have anything against the glutinous snail,” said Swarbrick, licking his lips and wagging his tail as he offered her a ride on his back over the talk-radio river, “but I’m not crying out for it and I don’t think many people are. What they need is help in this crisis.” And he was off! The former Downing Street media specialist had sensed the weak spot immediately – the fact that the policy document mentioned the kind of creature a spiritually dead cynic would find inherently amusing alongside more traditionally aesthetically pleasing ones like doves and choughs – and he knew that simply repeating the word snail, at the expense of trying to understand the benefits of the scheme, would force Creagh into a back-foot defence of the programme and pre-prepared positive policy statements. Job done. I could have predicted this would happen as soon as I heard the word “snail” in the set-up. Labour politicians! By all means save the lovely glutinous snail, but it really isn’t worth telling anyone on the right of politics you are doing that and expecting not to be ridiculed in bad faith.
How are government comms experts still so naive? Don’t feed people like Tom Swarbrick snails, especially after midnight. They will only chew them up and spit them back at you. Last week, an ex-magazine-editor friend joked that the Iranian online satirical hit-jobs on the Americans were so funny he thought they must have some kidnapped Shoreditch content providers making them in a Tehran dungeon. How is a theocratic autocracy suddenly much better at comedy than the land of Mark Twain, Maria Bamford and Spongebob Squarepants? The Labour government’s comms team need to be at least as sassy and savvy as some Iranians.
Creagh dispatched, Swarbrick handed to the news with the kiss-off: “Coming soon to a town near you, the glutinous snail.” I do hope so. The glutinous snail has come back from the dead, and hangs suspended like a tenacious grey ghost in water that ideally must be pure and pollution-free for it to survive. It feeds on plants and decaying fungi and it is not in the pay of Russian oil money. It is so delicate, it looks as if it is made of glass, and it is not connected to an international web of wealthy sex offenders. Right now, it lives only in Llyn Tegid, but it has not closed the Strait of Hormuz or invaded Ukraine. The glutinous snail is something to believe in.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart will appear with the virtue-signalling Ivo Graham and Tadiwah Malunge in a benefit for Asylum Aid and Hackney Migrant Centre at London’s Earth venue this Sunday, 19 April. He is talking to the director Mark Jenkin at a screening of his new film, Rose of Nevada, at Hackney Picture House on 26 April. And he is co-hosting a screening of the rockumentary King Rocker, with director Michael Cumming and star Robert Lloyd, as well as launching his new podcast, Joking Apart, at the Machynlleth Comedy Festival on 2 May.