Let’s face the facts, north London nut-roast nibblers of the Nerve nation! Based on the numbers, Nigel Farage is essentially the leader of the opposition. Nature must naturally abhor Nigel Farage, who denies climate change and opposes net zero. But nature’s internal charter compels it to abhor a vacuum even more. And Reform fills that vacuum, as slurry pours into a trough, or as a huge pie falls into the mouth of Kate Ovens, the UK’s most popular female competitive eater.
Like the mythical ouroboros, the twin disasters of Brexit and Boris Johnson have made the Conservative party eat itself tail first, but with less dignity than the massive wurm. Occasionally, when digesting its own rotting carcass in slow motion proves problematic, the dying Tory party may vomit out rebel MPs in the form of undigested owl-pellet pustules. Like Lee Anderson, Maria Caulfield and Danny Kruger.
In September, Kruger rose up, took human form once more and crossed the Commons floor to Reform. He took with him both his evangelical anti-abortion opinions and the delicious cakes of his mother, the baker Prue Leith, their creamy fillings ready to ooze into mouths more usually stuffed with paid-for pro-Russian propaganda and inaccurate information picked up from taxi drivers’ petrol-addled brains and the monetised misogynist Andrew Tate’s kung fu underpants Instagram posts. Naughty! But nice!
Like the Spinal Tap sequel, the Labour party in turn could never live up to the hopes invested in it, and that was without the helping hand of an Elton John cameo and one good joke about cheese. And as social media skews algorithmically and unstoppably rightwards, so Farage surfs a sewage wave made of your racist auntie’s forwarded Facebook filth, Elon Musk’s 2am brain parps, and the whirring of weaponised Kremlin bots, straight into the hearts of Reform-ready voters, oven-ready turkeys rushing towards the ovens.
But suppose Jeremy Corbyn, when he was leader of the opposition, had been alleged by nearly two dozen eyewitness allegers to have repeatedly crept up on Jewish schoolboys and whispered “Gas the Jews!” while making the hissing sound of gas escaping? You may remember, in 2015, Corbyn got a full front page of the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, full in the face like a Fred Karno pantomime pie for bowing at the Cenotaph at slightly the wrong angle. Take that, grandad!
But when Boris Johnson put his wreath upside down on the same Cenotaph in 2019, the BBC kindly edited the footage and replaced it with 2016 footage of him managing to lay the wreath the right way up. It’s not a cut I remember anyone on the right making a fuss about at the time. Johnson should have sued the BBC for £5bn, Trump-style, maintaining he suffered reputational damage to the valuable international perception of himself as a massive incompetent twat.
Had the youthful Farage’s youthful alleged gas hiss story been about a figure from the left, I doubt it would have simply been squeezed into the sidebar of the Times website’s front page above a fun bit about how fame was bad for your health. And I don’t think it would have been regionally disappeared (by virtue of the country the now-not-youthful Farage was in when he offered his ever-shifting excuses for the youthful behaviour he previously claimed he never did anyway) in the BBC’s “Welsh news” section. Even if the youthful Farage’s youthful comments had been explained away as youthful “banter”.
Shamima Begum ran away, espousing horrific antisemitic ideals, at 15 – then three years younger than the age the youthful Farage was last credibly reported allegedly youthfully hissing at Jews
For me, as a fellow vaudevillian, it is the youthful Farage’s youthful decision to youthfully repurpose the comic song Bless ’Em All by the great George Formby, which celebrates the diversity of second world war service personnel drawn to defend Britain from all over the empire, by changing the lyrics to “Gas Them All”, that I find particularly distressing. It would be like someone taking the phrase “Free Nelson Mandela”, from the Special AKA’s hit single of the same name, changing it to “Hang Nelson Mandela” and making it into merchandise, which the Federation of Conservative Students did in the 80s, when the scrupulously impartial BBC board member Robbie Gibb was its deputy chair. Different times. Banter. Repeat to fade. Vomit into own hat.
But, on budget day, a major moment in the unravelling of Farage’s myth was overshadowed by the Office of Budget Responsibility’s ludicrous early leaking of their budgetary analysis. You have one job! Nonetheless, Labour strategists finally decided that telling the truth about Farage’s Brexit – namely that it has blown a £90bn-a-year hole in the country’s public finances – might get more votes than just ignoring it, like someone stepping round a massive pile of dogshit on the living room carpet. Every day. For nine years.
But will it make any difference? As I file this, it’s Thursday morning. John Major’s Maurice Fraser lecture of last week – “Brexit is a flop. It will not leap up from its deathbed. It is losing our country £100bn of trade every year, as well as the tax revenue that trade would deliver” – remains roundly ignored by the press; on the Times front page the Farage racism story has shrivelled to an opinion piece by Deborah Ross; and Farage’s pointed refusal to investigate the influence of Putin, the politician he maintains he most admires, over Reform – “I'm not a police force, I haven't got the resources” – has passed largely without comment. (Farage has earned over £1m from second jobs, including his tacitly legal GB News infotainment show, since the last election, £200,000 of it from his bespoke Cameo video messages. There’s loads of investigators at the Nerve happy to investigate Reform’s Russia links for a fraction of the money Farage gets paid to wish happy birthday to morons, so let’s make a deal.) Is this the best you people can do? It shouldn’t be just a drunk comedian and a load of clever women who got laid off at the Observer asking these questions.
Jihadi bride Shamima Begum ran away from Bethnal Green espousing horrific antisemitic Islamist ideals at 15, then three years younger than the age the youthful Farage was last credibly reported allegedly youthfully hissing at Jews; and the elderly Farage maintained on his fun LBC phone-a-fascist show in 2019 that Begum knew what she was doing, at 15, and shouldn’t be allowed back into the UK. Can we at least see the leader of the opposition held accountable, as a middle-class 18-year-old white man educated to the highest level in one of the country’s finest schools, to the same standards as a brainwashed pregnant working-class 15-year-old Asian girl?
Stewart will be in conversation on stage with Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr on Wednesday 10 December at an exclusive Nerve members event in central London. Details will be emailed to members. To sign up for membership click here.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year, including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears with Richard Hawley and Dr John Cooper Clarke in a tribute to Clash road manager and cycling guru Johnny Green at London’s Cadogan Hall on Wednesday 3 December (currently sold out but there is a waiting list).