On Monday, the crusading investigative journalist Piers Morgan interviewed Jennifer Arcuri, the spurned 10-year business associate of Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Get-Stuffed FactcheckUK@CCHQ Johnson.
Shortly before being ridiculed by a bluntly Scottish Lorraine Kelly, the disputed tech-entrepreneur revealed that last time she phoned the prime minister she was fobbed off by someone, perhaps Turds himself, pretending to be Chinese by doing a Charlie Chan comedy voice. Heaven help us if Turds uses this conflict-avoidance method when dealing with the prime minister of China, who will find it velly lacist.
It’s Tuesday night now and I am sitting in front of the leaders’ election debate, with a family-size bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and a slab of Butty Bach beer. My mother and I used to swing by the once exotic KFC outlet in Hall Green in the 70s on the way back from my birthday Birmingham cinema trip. But our takeaway battered meat was then consumed at home, on plates, with cutlery. Like Donald Trump, my late mother had food standards. And back then so did I.
I haven’t eaten the fried fowl for two decades at least, but the first stirrings of the festive season have raised recollections of departed loved ones and the chicken bucket is my madeleine cake, dipped in Proustian tea. But my mother would not have eaten food out of a bucket. What has British politics done to me? What have I become? A horse? A donkey? An okapi? A pig? Maybe tomorrow I will upgrade to a trough.
I amuse myself with the nosh pail’s contents. Every time Turds tells a lie on television I neck a fistful of coleslaw. Turds’s pink arse-mouth boffs out his usual lie fart about 40 new hospitals, the verified figure of six inflated by 6.66 recurring. By the same maths, Turds, who was once “bursting with spunk”, would have 33.33 children. Or perhaps nearly 40, depending on which truth you believe. It must have been hard for Turds to count all those children on his fingers with one hand in someone’s knickers and the other in the till.
But the days when we were slaves to the meek toothless mewling of acquiescent courtier-broadcasters like Laura Kuenssberg’s flaccid BBC are behind us. We have the internet now, a worldwide web of truth! To check Turds’s hospital claims I log on to social media and find myself on the Twitter feed of a robust looking organisation called factcheckUK, the name of which leads me to believe it could doubtless expose some of Turds’s routinely ignored inconsistencies.
I chew my chicken while I check factcheckUK for facts that have been checked in the UK, but it seems a little biased in favour of the government. And I remember the Kentucky Fried being tastier. The flesh is too wet, the skin not as spicy as I recall, but I gobble my bucket down anyway, like an obedient pig.
And then I notice! This isn’t Kentucky Fried Chicken at all. The logo actually says Kingturkey Fried Chicken, but the lettering has been made to look as much like Kentucky Fried Chicken as possible. And I wonder if the Colin L Sanders bloke on the bucket knows his bearded face is being used to flog this fake southern fried.
Damn my naive eyes! It’s the oldest trick in the book!! A simple case of passing off!!! Kentucky Fried Chicken my feet!!!! At least this factcheckUK site is trustworthy. Maybe they know who is behind this Kingturkey Fried Chicken con. And so I look at factcheckUK and notice, for the first time, in tiny letters that occupy less than 1% of the logo’s area, the words “from CCHQ”. FactcheckUK is actually the Conservative campaign headquarters’s feed deliberately disguised, for the duration of the debate, as an independent fact-checking outfit and I fell for it.
FactcheckUK@CCHQ is the fake Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet of British politics and the Conservatives have held your head in its family bucket of falsehoods and forced you to feed on it. Never mind! Twitter sounded pretty serious about how they were going to stop social media being used to manipulate election results so I expect they will... do nothing.
Imagine a political landscape so ruined that a man who lied about the number of his children, about hospital upgrades, about the EU for two decades every week in the Daily Telegraph, about his oven-ready deal, about bridges, about bikes, about kippers, about pork pies, about money being spaffed up a wall, about his contact with the American white supremacist Steve Bannon and about £350m a week to the NHS, and who lies to his wives, to his bosses, and to his Queen can have his interests represented by a fake organisation that presumes to check facts.
The next morning, Dominic Raab, whose amusing cynicism and stupidity now seem terrifying, defended his government’s indefensible dishonesty, saying: “No one gives a… er… toss about social media.” The tombstone-foreheaded tool hesitated a second before saying “toss”, mentally calculating whether mild profanity would discredit him or make him look like the sort of telling-it-like-it-is truth talker Tories convince each other they are. Then he went for it. Toss! Toss toss toss!!! I said toss! Did you hear me, Dominic?
A few moments later, Tosser Raab was required to make a sad face to express sympathy for a former British consulate employee who had been tortured by the Chinese, enemies of democracy whose totalitarian activities are unacceptable. Everyone has a line in the sand, it seems. I threw my fake Kentucky bones away but kept the bucket. It looks like I’ll be needing something to vomit into on 13 December.
Extra London dates of Stewart Lee’s latest live show Snowflake/Tornado have just been announced at the South Bank Centre in June and July. It tours nationally from January. Visit stewartlee.co.uk/live-dates
