I believe it was I who wrote in June 2017 in this very paper: “The secret Tory steering committee has always intended Boris Johnson to be leader of the party and Theresa May has only been put in place as a kind of palate cleanser, a nasty-tasting mouthwash that you swill around your gums before being forced to eat actual human shit.”
Dude, I take no pleasure in having been right. The unopposed undemocratic coronation of the cheating, self-serving liar Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Inconclusive-Cocaine-Event Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson is the tipping point in my relationship with this reality. Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Inconclusive-Cocaine-Event Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson has made me realise, belatedly, that morality is an artificial construct we maintain by our mutual belief in its assumed value and all it takes is the success of one high-profile utter bastard to shatter the illusion. There’s nothing left to believe in. Johnson rends the fabric of faith.
In June, Judge Owen Davies QC allowed a class-A dabbler to walk free, saying he should “suffer no more” than Michael Gove. Similarly, how can you hold anyone to any standard when your prime minister is Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Inconclusive-Cocaine-Event Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson? Now every day at Westminster is the Purge, when no politician’s behaviour can be judged and all crimes are legal.
Dude, I’ve got kids. It is hard enough to limit Goat Simulator screen time when square-eyed seven-year-olds at school are allowed to assassinate foreign criminals in luxury hotel bathrooms on Hitman 2 every night. And how do I tell the children to be honest and good and hard working, when the highest office in the land is occupied by a lying, lazy cheat who says whatever bullshit flies for him in the moment and believes in nothing? Dude, every summer I make the children write diaries of their experiences. My five-year-old has already documented her attendance at the Bob Dylan/Neil Young concert in Hyde Park, naively opining of Dylan that “you couldn’t understand the words and all the songs sounded the same”. One day, when she understands the fluid nature of the endless river of Dylan’s genius, she will be very embarrassed about that! I wonder what the guests at her wedding will make of it?
But now, dude, when I tried to impress upon my daughter that it was time to report on her visit to the modernist stained glass exhibit at Gloucester Cathedral last Saturday, she said: “But, Dad, Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Inconclusive-Cocaine-Event Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson is prime minister. Why should anyone work at anything?” Dude, this is Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Inconclusive-Cocaine-Event Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson’s message to the world. If you play by rules, if you care, if you tell the truth, you are a mug, a loser. Prepare to get trampled in the race to the top, like a 10-year-old Japanese schoolboy rugby player. Dude!
Tim Montgomerie, a humourless, shuffling fidget who fulfils the Lurch role in the Addams Family of the modern Conservative movement, sees global press interest in Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Inconclusive-Cocaine-Event Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson’s valueless inauguration as evidence of his master’s “good box office”. But Titanic was good box office and it concerned the journey of an arrogant boat towards an immovable iceberg. People can’t turn their eyes away from an unfolding tragedy, from an unravelling disaster. This prime minister is morbidly fascinating, like slugs mating. Once I watched the cormorant that lives in Camden Lock trying to swallow a live eel. Now I will watch Boris Johnson deal with Brexit.
Dude, prepare to see a lot more of Boris Johnson’s “good box office”. His premiership will be the Sharknado of British politics and perhaps it too will have five increasingly self-parodic sequels and a cartoon spin-off voiced by the cast of Police Academy. Ha ha ha! But is there any way back now for British politics, towards the values of liberal democracy?
I believe it was I who said in a standup show in December 2013: “You can say what you like about Boris Johnson, but do you ever wake up stunned when you realise Boris Johnson is the actual mayor of London, a real place that exists? He’s not a paid mascot running around being buffoonishly amusing, while Ken Livingstone secretly does the actual mayor work locked inside a shipping container. He really is the actual mayor of London, capital city of an industrialised western nation. In Britain. Not in Italy, where the mayor is whichever man in the town touches the most women. This is Britain!” How we laughed.
And I believe it was I who repurposed the same sentences, in a spirit of environmentally friendly recycling, in another routine in 2016, thus: “You can say what you like about Boris Johnson, but do you ever wake up, stunned, when you realise Boris Johnson is the actual foreign secretary of Britain, a genuine country in the developed world? He’s not a paid mascot running around being buffoonishly amusing, while the real foreign secretary work is done by an unpaid Polish immigrant locked inside a shipping container.” How we laughed. And now, I suppose, I could do it all over again, but substitute the words “mayor of London” or “foreign secretary” with “prime minister of Britain”, but this time the sentences would turn to human shit in my mouth and I would choke on them and vomit over the front row. “Boris Johnson is Britain’s Trump,” says POTUS, incoherently, to cheering crowds of racist apologists, “they like me over there.”
Stewart Lee’s new standup show, Snowflake/Tornado, is at the Leicester Square theatre, London, from 29 October to 25 January 2020, with national dates to follow
