“After seeing his latest show, I was reminded how few comedians can keep an audience completely focused with layered storytelling and satire like Stewart Lee. His pacing, callbacks and social commentary reward people who pay attention rather than chase quick laughs. In a world where so much comedy is chopped up into short online clips, it is refreshing to watch someone build something that unfolds slowly. Has anyone else seen the show yet?”
This flattering comment opened a discussion on an internet message board about me, where I occasionally check in to see if I remain on-brand for my libtard customer base. It’s also, in its drab blandness, clearly an AI-generated attempt to farm engagement, by a bot called SlimJimNeedsATrim, who isn’t a real person, and is one of many similarly flattering false fans on the site. Maybe I don’t have any real fans? Perhaps my fake fans talk to each other. Maybe some of them are now in flirtatious AI-generated relationships, bonding over how they think, as the similarly non-existent ChelseaTricks opined, “it’s wild how Lee’s managed to evolve without losing that strange rhythm and bite that makes him so unique”.
Unlike the millions of bots that drove pro-Trump and anti-EU comment in the 2024 US election and the Brexit referendum respectively, Slim and Chelsea don’t have political agendas. They just want to keep you online, looking at adverts and generating harvestable data. But last weekend I felt like I couldn’t trust anything. First, Sky News ran an interview with Andrew Fox, honorary president of the Aston Villa Jewish Supporters’ Club, about Birmingham’s ban on the notoriously violent fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv, Tommy Robinson’s favourite ultras.
I couldn’t find any mention of an Aston Villa Jewish Supporters’ Club, or its honorary president, online. Andrew Fox’s own website boasts that he is an associate fellow of the neoliberal Henry Jackson Society thinktank who has written for Michael Gove’s Spectator and lectured at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and who specialises in “the psychology of disinformation”. A disinformation specialist? You don’t say? Or do you? When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Unless what they’re telling you is “disinformation”, in which case don’t. Unless it’s a double bluff. In which case do.
The following night I was sitting in my car alone at midnight eating Frazzles™ ®, and listening to Nick Abbot on LBC. Abbot was talking to a man from a group called the Concerned Alumni of the Oxford Union, who have, as I write, succeeded in getting the private debating society’s incoming president, George Abaraonye, voted out. Abaraonye, a clever, dreadlocked black man, is the kind of fully formed Daily Mail folk-devil Richard Littlejohn would have had to invent had not Abaraonye foolishly obliged him by expressing delight at the death of Charlie Kirk. But, again, something didn’t ring true. So I Googled Abbot’s guest. It took me 10 seconds.
The studiedly self-effacing James Price was actually a research fellow at the centre-right Tufton Street thinktank The Centre for Policy Studies, which has been ranked as one of the four least transparent thinktanks in the UK in relation to funding. I rang LBC and said if Price’s background wasn’t addressed I would write something about it somewhere. (I appreciate this is the journalistic equivalent of saying “Do you know who I am?” to a clearly indifferent security guard.)
Abbot may already have planned to pull the rug out, but within minutes he said that the Concerned Alumni of the Oxford Union “sounded like one of those rightwing thinktanks out of 55 Tufton Street, like Migration Watch, Restore Trust, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and all these opaquely funded organisations of which we know not where they get their money from?” Not only was this great radio, but it was actual journalism in real time!
Price countered that he wrote his anti-Abaraonye column in the Daily Telegraph under a picture of his own “ugly mug” and so wasn’t hiding, and that Tufton Street donors’ identities are hidden “because these people, when they are discovered, face threats of violence and abuse from leftwing mobs”. Really? I don’t remember seeing any mobs of cocaine-fuelled thugs threatening to burn down Tufton Street, and any children sheltering inside, although in 2022 Led By Donkeys did mount a blue plaque on the building saying “The economy was crashed here”.
From that point, Price abandoned the manufactured bonhomie with which he had placed calculated rightwing talking points as if they were gentle chit-chat, and the mask slipped. He ranted about young people who have no responsibilities but choose instead to spend their days “just demanding rights and not understanding the world”, and folded like a wet anti-Ulez pamphlet, showing what the mildest moment of pushback can achieve. Maybe if people had called out Nigel Farage’s affiliations 15 years ago, we wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of a fascist UK future run by people too incompetent to mediate a local council Zoom call.
Which reminds me to remind you that it’s that time of year again when the Tufton Street-affiliated astroturf pressure group Restore Trust try to parachute their own candidates on to the board of the National Trust – perhaps to meddle with a constitution that protects vast tracts of land from development, or to reverse the Trust’s policy of discreetly acknowledging the role of slave-trade money in the creation of the great houses, the woke idiots.
If you’re a National Trust member, it’s important to vote for the Trust’s preferred candidates online in the AGM before midnight on Halloween. Well-funded, insidious forces are levelled against our democracy and our liberal institutions, who don’t care about using disinformation to spread their agendas, and, as Trump has shown, democracy is paper-thin and easily punctured. Act now. Or every National Trust property is going to look like the remodelled White House Rose Garden. With cage-fighting.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year. Stewart appears with Harry Hill in a benefit for orangutans at Leicester Square theatre, London, on 24 November