On Wednesday, at prime minister’s questions, the leader of the Conservative party, Kemi Badenoch, conducted herself with all the grace and decorum of a woman squatting over a cavernously deep field latrine and hoping that whatever clods of filth she deposited into it would make a splash that would echo all around the world. Plop! Plop!! Boom!!!
(Why do I think these obscene things and then express them? It’s a thin line between being a comedian and getting paid for saying this stuff, and being an innocent man with a terrible mental health condition who gets targeted and abused by millions of people online. Ah well. Swings and roundabouts.)
For the avoidance of doubt, in these nuance-resistant times where even the heavy-handed metaphor above may be open to wilful misinterpretation by Daily Mail columnists, I’ll clarify. The field latrine is social media, specifically Elon Musk’s AI–child-pornography platform Twitter (currently X); the clods of filth are Badenoch’s obvious and clanking attempts to attach the phrase “paedo protectors” to the Labour government; and the splash echoing all around the world is the possibility that these comments will go viral and stick.
Badenoch said that Labour activists have had the phrase “paedo protectors” shouted at them by the satirical British public because of their association with the dead paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, with whom they are associated by their association with the dismissed underpants-ambassador Peter Mandelson. Badenoch is cynical and shameless enough to know that if she can shit the phrase “paedo protectors” out there fast and hard enough on to sympathetic, algorithmically right-skewing social media such as Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X), it will be out there for ever, like that meme of Michael Rosen’s face looking shocked.
Then the phrase “paedo protectors” will be consolidated by the algorithms in the way that Musk’s platform has already consolidated propaganda about dangerous multicultural Muslim-mayored London. Once the lie becomes a Twitter-truth, we are only one move away from an oafish enabler like Ricky Gervais trying to reiterate it on the global far right’s behalf as part of his Dutch Barn vodka advertising campaign. “Welcome to London. Don’t forget your stab vest.” Vodka idiot. And what even is Dutch Barn? It sounds like a euphemism for sexual activity involving copious amounts of flatus and some farm animals.
Badenoch’s Undignified Field Latrine Dump, as political historians of the future are already calling it, is perhaps the most mainstream example of an increasing tendency for cynical perception-wranglers, usually on the right and in the pay of secret billionaires, to say or do things not because they believe them, and not because they are particularly appropriate or relevant in the moment, but because of how they will play subsequently on social media, filleted to byte-size chunks and shorn of context. Plop! Plop!! Splash!!!
When the Triggernometry podcast’s monetised controversialist Konstantin Kisin appears on the BBC’s Question Time, without any explanation of his funding or provenance, as if he were a climatically induced mould or some kind of seasonal insect plague, he hopes to create a succession of powerful Gotcha! moments which will go viral, such as making the secretary of state for Scotland, Douglas Alexander, have a bit of a red face by interrupting him. And when Gideon Falter of the Campaign Against Antisemitism tried to walk against the flow of a pro-Palestine march in London in April 2024 while wearing a yarmulke, he emerged with footage that made a nuanced conversation with a not unsympathetic police officer, who he demanded arrest him, look far worse than it was.
And so it was that when on 29 January on Oxford Street, London, I saw an American born-again Christian, and his followers and some children, bellowing through a PA system that homosexuals were going to hell, I instinctively looked for the cameras and assumed he was trying to engineer some kind of viral Gotcha! only yards from Soho, historically London’s best area for homosexuality.
A patient female officer, presumably struggling above her pay grade with the theological implications of Romans 1: 26-27, suggested to the preacher this was only his interpretation
Passersby attempted to remonstrate with the man, some trying to wrestle the microphone from his hand, while four hi-viz Oxford Street Guardians watched and did nothing. It looked like an actual street brawl was going to kick off. I tried to advise the man to stop for his own safety but, increasingly frenzied, he started shouting about how there was no freedom of speech in Starmer’s Britain, which sounded like a rightwing JD Vance anti-European talking point looking for a pre-planned incident to perch on.
I have history with this sort of thing. In the mid-noughties, the efforts of similarly minded protesters effectively rendered Richard Thomas’s Olivier award-winning Jerry Springer: the Opera, which I directed, unperformable and financially non-viable, and I was driven back penniless towards the world of standup after five years’ largely unwaged work. There I instead became the most critically acclaimed practitioner of the medium this century, providing comfort to distressed liberals all over the land, as the world they knew was ruined beyond recognition. Perhaps this was Christ’s plan for me all along? Perhaps this is why I was “triggered”. And why I, along with other onlookers, called the police.
Fifteen minutes later, officers listened to the Christian explain that what he was saying was God’s word, and that homosexuals were going to hell. A patient female officer, presumably struggling above her pay grade with the theological implications of Romans 1: 26-27, 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10, 1 Timothy 1: 9-10 and Jude 1:7, and with the validity of the inclusion of Paul’s epistles in the accepted Christian canon generally, suggested to the preacher that this was only his interpretation of the holy text and he was ordered to desist, which he and his entourage did. Nothing had got filmed. Nothing had splashed and echoed in Badenoch’s field latrine. I was being paranoid. This was just genuine bigotry, not political theatre. Thank God for that!
But then this week, I recognised the same sort of flushed faces again. American born-again Christian ranters, though not necessarily the same ones, had finally made the actual newspapers after all, and GB News and TalkTV, having arrived outside a mosque in Whitechapel at the start of Ramadan to say “I’ve never met a Muslim who is free from sin, I’ve never met a Muslim who is free from anger, I’ve never met a Muslim who is free from crime, I’ve never met a Muslim who is free from hatred” through a megaphone. I’ve said worse things about religious people, but usually inside the giant inverted commas of the theatre or comedy club stage, and not outside St Paul’s on Easter Day.
An agitated group of locals were captured on camera while a female police officer, having attended a different theological training course to the Oxford Street one, explained that the Christians, on this occasion, had the right to express their views (it wasn’t a matter of interpretation), and she was subsequently praised for her courage by the usual rightwing commentators. Maybe the Christians had no agenda beyond thinking Muslims were sinful, and not necessarily more sinful than anyone else. But if the Whitechapel incident was an attempt to create and place a “No Free Speech Britain” story, it didn’t work, as the right to call all Muslims evil was upheld by the police.
However, the two incidents do throw up another story. In Starmer’s Britain, it appears the police will protect a Soho homosexual’s right not to be insulted, but will, rightly or wrongly, leave Whitechapel Muslims to lump it. It appears there’s one law blah blah blah. Is this a concrete example of the two-tier policing we have heard so much about? I think Nigel Farage needs to investigate and then invite the hard-done-by Whitechapel faithful onstage at the next Reform conference to complain about it.
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