March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019

by Stewart Lee

I said, ‘Your poppy’s massive, isn’t it, Suzanne? Jeremy Corbyn’s is tiny. He’s a traitor, isn’t he?’

But they aren’t. Boris Johnson, for example, himself a lying columnist for the lying Daily Telegraph, is currently the worst one of ‘them’ all by some distance.

And ‘maverick’ is what the commissioner shouts at Dirty Harry. It’s not what Dirty Harry tells the commissioner he is himself. That would be very uncool.

In the 1997 James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, the state-sponsored assassin–rapist 007 thwarts an evil, global, multi-platform news agency that uses covert actions to generate newsworthy crises, which it then profits from by covering them.

When he was a student, David Cameron put his penis into a dead pig’s face, didn’t he?7 And then to outdo him, to do something even more bizarre and obscene, Michael Gove put his penis into a Daily Mail journalist.

And if you think it’s funny that Boris Johnson is foreign secretary – and it is, arguably – I guarantee you he’s gonna be prime minister at some point. Theresa May has been put in place, it’s now clear, by the steering committee as a sort of a palate cleanser, kind of a nasty-tasting mouthwash that you swill around your gums before being forced to eat actual human shit.10