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Stewart Lee

Stewart Lee

The Guardian

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Andrew Neil needs to be more Vorderman, less Voldemort

The discredited television personality Andrew Neil, formerly the laughing launch-face of the seemingly Ofcom-untouchable, fun-packed, fact-averse,...

21.04.2024 30

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Joe Lycett edits Observer New Review I value Brummie art, but who else does?

Why should the people of Birmingham have 100% arts cuts imposed on them? Brummies are quite capable of devaluing their own art without official...

14.04.2024 20

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

The right is as stale as its ‘woke National Trust scones’ gambit

William Blake wrote that we can see heaven in a wild flower and hold infinity in the palms of our hands. He also thought a massive flea with a bald...

07.04.2024 30

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Which will melt away first, the snow or the arts?

Nineteen years ago now, I was asked to perform my standup high in the Colorado Rockies at the Aspen comedy festival, a trade fair for the American...

24.03.2024 20

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Cabbies have given me some great lines, but they have nothing on Frank Hester

I am often accused of fabricating false taxi drivers, to create straw-man mouthpieces to embody easily satirised counter-arguments that I want to kick...

17.03.2024 60

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Jeremy Hunt’s budget mixtape is no match for Brexit’s greatest hits

On Wednesday, I watched Jeremy Hunt unveil the budget live on TV, though a carefully coordinated campaign of leaks to client media outlets meant it...

10.03.2024 30

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

How do civilisations collapse? Ask Lee Anderson

Last weekend, I stood on a remote Derbyshire moor with my flask and surveyed the romantic remnants of a once-flourishing society that faded out,...

03.03.2024 50

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

We swallow Sunak’s pasty gaffe but still dine out on Miliband’s bacon butty

Earlier this month, Rishi Sunak went to the economically depressed, wealthy second-home owners’ paradise of Cornwall, which is now £230m down as...

18.02.2024 50

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

The chilling soulless cruelty of Rishi Sunak is the stuff of nightmares

On Tuesday morning I woke in Liverpool with a start, my heart hammering after a night of the most wretched thoughts. The last thing I had seen before...

11.02.2024 60

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Only votes from the dead can keep this zombie Tory government alive

If the dead could vote, who would they vote for? And what would the deceased community make of the Britain they have left behind? For example, in ye...

04.02.2024 20

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

If the National Trust can be captured by a fake grassroots group, what public institution is safe?

Ah! The turning of the seasons! Once it was always early summer, as swifts swooped from gables, when the private limited company Restore Trust would...

28.01.2024 60

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Like all supervillains, the Tories will meet their match

On Wednesday, the former environment secretary Thérèse Coffey, on whose watch the deregulated post-Brexit waterways of Britain turned into rivers of...

21.01.2024 50

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

What next for woke ITV after the Post Office drama? Danny Dyer v the sewage scandal?

What is the point of the arts? Last week, it appeared it is to create accessible mainstream drama that highlights and threatens to actually resolve an...

14.01.2024 9

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Where did all the government’s wine go? Expect another vintage Tory evasion

A government wine cellar provides “guests of the government, from home and overseas, with wines of appropriate quality at reasonable cost”....

07.01.2024 10

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

My plan to topple the Tory dark lords in 2024

Happy new year! But is it too late to save British democracy as we once knew it? In 2024, details of your awkward rectal prolapse could soon be...

31.12.2023 40

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

How to have a happy Christmas – an exclusive poem by Wendy Cope

26.12.2023 70

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

The Bleak Midwinter Messages: a Conservative ghost story for Christmas

“Gentlemen,” began the Baron to his two companions, faces flickering in the guttering coals, “I beg your indulgence on a very peculiar matter,...

24.12.2023 8

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Sunak has supersized his lies, from WhatsApps to Rwanda

It’s a privilege to write funny columns about the news for the Observer, and every Sunday I wake excitedly to see what flows from the slushy pen of...

17.12.2023 20

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

At £38,700 for a foreign-born spouse, how many could the Tories afford?

Without the foreign genes of foreign husbands and foreign wives to strengthen the British gene pool, the tragic mental deficiencies that caused 52% of...

10.12.2023 80

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Nigel Farage shouldn’t be in the jungle – get him out of there!

In 2011, Nigel Farage co-chaired the Europe of Freedom and Democracy grouping with Italy’s Francesco Speroni, who described the Norwegian white...

26.11.2023 3

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

When peace protesters came face to face with the Tories’ weapon of mass distraction

Don’t you just wish the silent majority would shut up? The violence that rightwing politicians and columnists evidently hoped to help on its way...

19.11.2023 30

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

I’m not sure I feel comfortable pinning a poppy to my cagoule this year

Well done, rightwing culture warriors! I’ve worn a poppy with pride every year since I was a choirboy, singing around Solihull war memorial on...

12.11.2023 6

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Will the planet outlive my dying laptop?

I fear the Apple Store. It’s a disorienting cross between a Los Angeles hotel lobby, the place where everyone over 30 gets killed in Logan’s Run...

05.11.2023 6

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

The Tory MP protecting Ipswich, Twix by Twix

Stop me if I’ve told you this one before, but 20 years ago, a BNP-supporting aunt of mine forwarded me a document, purporting to be a scholarly...

29.10.2023 40

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Labour’s meat tax is just another Tory lie that we’ve all been forced to swallow

W hen I was a younger man, if someone had come up to me in the old Wheatsheaf pub in Camden on a Friday night and said they wanted to tax my meat, I...

08.10.2023 70

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Wake up, people! GB News is after our National Trust scones

O n Wednesday, the professionally cross actor-songwriter Laurence Fox was taken off air by GB News, the newsertainment channel funded by the Brexiter...

01.10.2023 4

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

Vote no to the thinktank pod people trying to body-snatch the National Trust

I love British traditions. Whose heart soars not upon seeing some drunk men chasing a cheese down a fatally steep Gloucestershire hill, or some drunk...

24.09.2023 70

The Guardian

Stewart Lee

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