The North Sea oil fan Andy “Burn Them” Burnham’s maiden Labour conference speech has thrown open the curtains of the party’s darkened sickroom, flooding it with the angelic light of the very north London metropolitan liberal elitist values that the party had previously been trying to disavow, in pursuit of the elusive Brexit-racist vote. Europe! Public ownership!! Sure Start!!! Whatever next? Being nice to transgender people? I don’t think so! Steady on!! Either this wallpaper goes or I do.
Some say the tragic death of Burnham’s father focused the new prime minister’s mind on the crisis of social care, and the way it is funded, in post-Brexit Britain. If that’s what it takes to fix a problem, then hopefully Burnham’s bichon-poo rescue dog Axel, a cross between a bichon-frise and a poodle, will get fatally ill and die as soon as possible. Maybe then Burnham will do something for British pet owners currently cowering under the cosh of ever-increasing vet bills, as the market is cornered by massive companies owned by private equity firms. Thank you, Axel. Off you pop! Greater love hath no bichon-poo. What kind of person calls a dog Axel anyway? That’s the name of a middle-class human man, surely? It’s like calling a boy Fido.
Meanwhile, out in the countryside, far away from the Labour government’s Liverpool dockside conference with its chinking of champagne socialists’ socialist champagne glasses of socialist champagne, where movers and shakers on the left give their pets human names like Colin and Pauline and Alfie, it would appear that ordinary people continue to eat raw offal in all its forms, guzzle Bovril ™ ® by the yard from long glass tubes, and fear foreigners, even when they aren’t even foreign. The small hours of Sunday night! A country lane!! A van with a single barrel of petrol in it!!! RAF Fairford!!!! Gloucestershire!!!!! What really went on there? We only have this extract, and it’s from the testimony of a “hero farmer” ( © Daily Mail 27/9/26)!
“I just thought, what the hell are they doing? I saw a group of Middle Eastern-looking young guys running off through the trees. Some of them had masks or balaclavas on, and they all scattered ahead of us as we drove back past,” the hero farmer told the Daily Mail, which had opened its report on the Fairford manifestation with the following sentence: “A hero farmer alerted police over an alleged car bomb plot on RAF Fairford after stumbling upon five 'Middle Eastern-looking, masked' men on the way home from a party.” To be fair to the hero farmer, I appreciate her vigilance. I would have assumed the three white vans were just delivery drivers who had given up and got lost, having hurled my Amazon order of the new Hawkwind Bristol Custom Bike Show 1986 live album into a damp bush to get soaked and ruined instead of leaving it in my mailbox.
I’m not saying the hero farmer’s description of the Middle Eastern masked men isn’t accurate, but the direction of travel of the story was immediately set in motion. In blurred photographs taken in the aftermath of their arrest, the now handcuffed and shirtless Middle Eastern masked men, unmasked but their faces pixelated in the western fashion, appear to me to be relatively pale-skinned, but then they are floodlit by massive police security lights. The fact that I usually appear brightly lit on the standup comedy stage, for example, means that neither my 1/32nd Indian heritage, nor the fact that a representative of Scandinavia’s Indigenous peoples has suggested I might like to join the Sami Council, have been noted by the press or the audience.
I don’t know the facts of the hero farmer’s story. And so it wouldn’t be appropriate to say anything definitive. But not knowing anything definitive never stopped Reform’s cacophonous inflatable hate-frog Nigel Farage from making definitive statements before the starter’s gun in the collective race to blame brown people has even been fired.
For Farage, speaking on Monday, the Fairford Five (who sound like the heroes of an Enid Blyton novel about military sabotage, foreign influence, and lashings of ginger beer) were evidence of the fact that hostile regimes like Iran were using the small boats “to get their operatives into Britain”. What a waste of time that would have been! There’s no need for hostile regimes to smuggle operatives in to do us harm. Russia, for example, just paid Reform’s now-incarcerated leader in Wales, Nathan Gill, hard cash to do its bidding, and no one even got their feet wet or climbed into a dinghy. And Farage himself, who didn’t arrive here by dinghy, has declared the hostile foreign actor Vladimir Putin “the politician he admires most”. All I can say is I hope he is being well paid!
A few hours after Farage blamed small boat migrants for The Fairford Five Fiasco (Puffin Books, RRP £7.99), the police revealed that the men arrested were all British nationals anyway, and were suspected of being proxies for hire. Farage, a sack of rotting seaweed in human form, with flies buzzing in and out of it to lay their eggs in the soggiest bits (which then grow into maggots), was of course quick to correct the record. But he did so in a way that continued to push his own agenda, adding: “I have been saying it for years. I didn’t say anything different yesterday. What I have been saying for years and saying all summer: our national security is threatened from the outside by weakness on borders like it has never been before.” Even though, on this occasion, it wasn’t.
And if Farage’s anti-migrant message didn’t hit home first time due to having been made immediately irrelevant by the emergence of actual facts, then the impotently futile Ofcom organisation will ensure that he, a sitting MP, is nonetheless able to further amplify it on a programme bearing his own name on an opaquely funded TV channel called GB News, even though this would appear to contradict its own wonky guidelines.
There’s no need for hostile regimes to smuggle operatives in to do us harm. Russia, for example, just paid Nathan Gill hard cash to do its bidding
In a BBC News interview clarifying the The Fairford Five ™ ® story, Andy Burnham explained: “We will say more in due course, but we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part.” And I can confirm my belief that I believe it’s an indication of how strong Burnham’s belief is that he was able to confirm his belief in his own belief by using the words “belief” and “believe” too many times in the same sentence.
At some point it became clear that one of the five suspects himself had phoned the police to dob the rest of The Fairford Five in (which is why the police were already on top of the situation even before the hero farmer heroically weighed in). This suggests that a slow realisation had dawned on the suspect that whatever the fuck it was he and his loser mates had been subcontracted to do, perhaps by anonymous proxy, was bigger than they initially realised. It reminds me of the moment where Noddy Holder, in the fantasy Slade biopic Flame, realises he is expected to use a microphone that is perpetually ablaze, and declares: “You want me to sing into that?”
And then the police let all of The Fairford Five out on bail anyway because it didn’t seem worth further detaining them. Which, given that they will incarcerate octogenarian environmental or anti-genocide activists for merely planning a protest or knitting on a pavement, suggests that they really had nothing to go on and didn’t believe they posed a threat. What’s happening? It’s like something from the mindfarts of TV’s Chris Morris.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the adjudicated sexual abuser and convicted fraudster and president of the USA, had already made an opportunistic statement claiming that the men, both masked and Middle Eastern-looking, were intending to “do big damage”, and that the US had been "working with Britain", adding "we had them under view for a long time, and we got them.” Really?
Now The Fairford Five are out on bail, it’s not clear if the masked and Middle Eastern-looking men themselves even knew what it was they were supposed to be doing, or why. So how could Trump have been aware of them when they probably weren’t even aware of themselves? What is the exact nature of Donald Trump’s relationship with observable reality? If Donald Trump falls asleep in a forest, and there’s no one there to hear him snore, does he even make a sound?
And why are we allowing Donald Trump to bomb Iran from an airbase on British soil anyway, when each of his bombing raids merely serves to exacerbate a crisis that achieves nothing but driving up our fuel prices? Every time an American bomber takes off from Fairford, another Lerwick fisherman decides he can no longer afford to fuel his boat and decides to drink himself to death with cans of Tennent’s in a brightly lit bar decorated by a lone black and white photograph of the Shetland fiddler Aly Bain.
If The Fairford Five didn’t know what it was they were doing, whatever it was, I sympathise with them. Is writing this column the thing that I am doing now? And if it is, what am I supposed to be doing? And if so, why? Donald Trump lies. Nigel Farage lies. And Ofcom sticks out its tongue and laps up the lies, and then wipes the dried crust off its eyelashes and puts it all to the back of its mind. And we sit here, you and I, like Neanderthal troglodytes gathered round a fire, watching the flickering flames of the unfolding stories, filtered through the bent news media of biased billionaires, as they cast meaningless shadows on the cave wall of our consciousness, wondering what it all means, and whether it will affect our ability to find our decaying parents a bed to die in.
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.
And 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 at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, on the same project but with the dream-pop prodigy Stone Anthem, on 11 October