Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (3 page)

Prince Harry underwent hostage training in preparation for Afghanistan. It can’t be easy having a royal hostage. You’re supposed to cut off bits that serve no useful purpose and post them back. Where would you start? I hope he never gets killed on active duty. I hate to think of someone saying they need to inform his next of kin, then all the generals just looking awkwardly at the floor.

Harry was in the US to attend the Warrior Games. If he wanted to watch injured servicemen fight among themselves he should just nip down to any soup kitchen in the UK and throw a slice of bread on the ground. I’ve a fascination with watching disabled people play sports that has developed naturally from years attending Scottish Premier League football matches.

Cheryl Cole revealed she had a dream about marrying Harry. Something that in real life would surely end in a car crash bigger than her solo career. Cheryl doesn’t seem like she’d fit in with the royals, but who knows, maybe the Queen also has a barbed-wire thigh tattoo. In most of my dreams I’m a princess as well – although I then unfurl into a half-horse, half-Gok Wan centaur who plays just behind the front two for Spurs, so I don’t know what to think.

I suppose my political overview is that this five-thousand-year experiment to see what would happen if we let the cunts make all the decisions is going really badly. Anyone who doubts that power corrupts should have a think about what arseholes tall people are.

A key thing in the politics of Britain is the idea of consensus opinion. You see it in comedy where people say such and such a thing shouldn’t be joked about but will joke about it themselves in private. They mean you can’t say it in public because it would outrage consensus opinion. They’ll maintain this even after you do it in a theatre to a few thousand people and nobody gives a shit. Even people in the theatre will laugh and think, ‘You can’t say that in public.’ By which they mean the press will get a hold of it and jump on a stool shrieking and holding their little skirts. So
public opinion
really is almost synonymous with
media opinion
, and the dangers of that are pretty obvious.

For a comedian – someone whose job it is to deal with taboos and language – consensus is
the idea that you shouldn’t talk about the world as you see it but instead about some socially agreed version
. But it shouldn’t be a very hard decision. If you live in one of history’s rare pockets of free speech it’s kind of your duty to use it. Basically, the choice is between drawing freehand and colouring between the lines.

‘Consensus’ is something that most people have to make allowances for, yet, contrary to the word’s literal meaning, most of us have very little say in what it is. The symbolic importance of public opinion is only allowed so long as people themselves are utterly marginalised. What’s your real ability to influence the idea of what public opinion is on an issue? Tweet to two hundred followers, write a letter to the
Sun
, apply to be in the audience on
Question Time
? Who gets to decide what the public are saying they’re outraged by or interested in? Well, Rupert Murdoch; corporate think tanks; the BBC. The public’s idea of what the public thinks is almost entirely controlled by vested interests. Interests usually completely contrary to the public interest.

What is party politics in Britain? I mean, what
is
it? It’s like support groups for a series of hysterical personality disorders that have embezzled other people’s money to hold a competition to find the world’s most boring sentence on board a crashing Zeppelin. Yes, anyone can vote. A fact that warms my heart each election day as I watch people yanking at the polling station door despite the obvious ‘Push’ sign.

People are outraged over plans to increase MPs’ wages. Well, if they’re not allowed to fiddle their expenses anymore then what are they supposed to do? Buy their own Kit Kats? MPs’ current salaries are only £66,396 a year and when you take off how much of that goes towards housing, transport and general living costs, that only leaves them with £66,396 a year. We should remember that MPs do a very difficult job, and they do it very badly.

• • •

The Tories’ role is essentially to make you eat their arseholes and simultaneously sneer at you for not knowing what kind of wine goes best with arsehole. As a Scot, whenever I hear George Osborne speak I instinctively start gathering up my belongings, expecting there’ll be a knock on the door from the local sheriff telling me that this area is to become grazing land for sheep and that we’re to be cleared off by dawn. And when I see Theresa May – wearing those weird clothes of hers – demanding the abolition of human rights I keep thinking I’ve stumbled upon a
Star Trek
I’ve never seen before (instead of the new version). I only keep watching in the hope that Kirk will come on from the side and punch her in the head. Meanwhile, in the audience Spock screams, ‘MOTHER!’

Osborne’s still insisting he never took cocaine as a student, claiming the only time he snorted at Oxford was when told stories of the troubles of the poor. Osborne on cocaine? Well, there’s the answer to ‘Whatever gave this tit the idea he could run the economy?’ The man is so rich I can’t imagine he’d use a rolled-up twenty. Maybe the deeds to Hertfordshire.

Cocaine makes you arrogant. If I were Osborne I wouldn’t deny my cocaine past, I’d use it as a great excuse to cover for my array of God-given personality defects. I actually think it should be mandatory for the Chancellor to take cocaine, particularly before making the Budget speech. Instead of fiscal plans and growth forecasts he’d spend three hours pitching a screenplay he’s writing about a dog who’s been given his master’s brain.

At the
GQ
awards Osborne joked that no teenagers reading
GQ
wanked over his picture. I think you’re wrong there, George. I think the ones in Pakistan holding machine guns might do. If his current public image is the face that, after careful consideration, Osborne chooses to present to the world, then in reality he must be like a rogue android of Uday Hussain. He behaves as if Ted Bundy – experimenting with meditation – had found his mind conquered by a powerful telepathic crocodile. An amazing person, who, even when regularly advised not to sneer in public, just can’t bring himself not to. The other plausible explanation is that his PR team is headed up by the time-travelling Sherriff of Nottingham. Perhaps the Chancellor’s red box is actually made from Robin Hood’s skin.

Osborne also announced that benefit payments are to be linked to the ability to speak English. So that’s everyone on the dole in Glasgow fucked. Immigrants will lose benefits if they fail to improve their English at the same time as the government has been cutting language courses. It’s got to the stage where immigrants are being taught English from the words spray-painted across their doors. Immigrants will only keep benefits if they take English lessons up to the standard of a nine-year-old. That’s apparently the level necessary to understand barked instruction but with insufficient vocabulary to make it through a tribunal.

Foreign sex workers are being given free English lessons to help them understand the filthy things they’re being asked to do. It’s like a modern Eliza Doolittle: ‘Why, I’ll wager I could take a common streetwalker and turn her into a high-class prostitute!’ It makes you proud to be British that we’re willing to give immigrants a leg-up, as long as they’re long legs attached to sexy bodies that offer inexpensive blowjobs.

The Tories also unveiled the new citizenship test and I’d like to see everyone take it. A question such as ‘Which admiral has a monument in Trafalgar Square?’ would give most
X Factor
contestants a stroke and enable us to deport the entire cast of
TOWIE
. At the top of each test would be the most pertinent question of all – ‘Why the fuck would you want to come here?’ They’re also placing tougher restrictions on benefits to immigrants. We don’t want our tax money spent on foreigners; we want it spent on going to the Middle East to pointlessly shoot foreigners.

Of course, what the Tories really think is ‘Why don’t we save time, stop all judicial decisions, the offering of evidence, defence arguments; just deport anyone who doesn’t know that Starburst used to be called Opal Fruits.’ The flaw in the idea that we need to educate immigrants about British history is that a lot of them have a better grasp of it than us, particularly of the bit where the British blew up their granny.

Immigrants often have to do totally different jobs from the ones they trained for in their own country. For instance, the bloke who took my appendix out told me he was a cleaner back in Poland. The guide to the test costs thirteen quid – save your money immigrants. If you want to be British then get pregnant when you’re twelve and state that your greatest ambition is to see Rylan in a shopping centre.

The Tories are like some deranged sex killer who breaks down and tries to confess his crimes at a murder mystery weekend only to have people laugh and applaud at what they assume is his wonderful acting. At every Tory Conference the party outlines its priorities: building a Deathstar; killing Harry Potter; and creating a doorway into our dimension so the Many-Angled Ones can harvest our souls to the accompaniment of several previously unreleased Fleetwood Mac albums.

Boris Johnson usually gives a keynote speech that sounds like a Labrador having a ketamine-induced psychotic episode. And all the Tories speak of the Lib Dems like a celebrity speaks about the heavily sedated sibling they’ve sprung from hospital long enough to make up the numbers on
Family Fortunes
.

It’s been said that Boris Johnson doesn’t have the skills to become prime minister. He doesn’t seem to have the skills to get dressed, but it happens. Sort of. Many Tories want Boris to lead them into the next election. I wouldn’t trust Boris to lead me into a revolving door.

That said, Boris has done surprisingly well for a man who resembles a bouncy castle with Alzheimer’s. On Mumsnet he described himself as a chocolate digestive: consistent and reliable. And also because rugby players regularly masturbated on him at Eton. If British politics were a film, Boris would be a character they’d put in just to sell toys. A teenager from Lancashire had Boris tattooed on his thigh. He might as well just have had two eyes tattooed on his arse.

It’s amazing that these people can be so self-conscious without ever noticing how dreadful they are. Louise Mensch had a facelift. Hopefully, moving her mouth closer to her brain has helped but I feel terribly let down. I’d always thought she didn’t move her mouth properly because she’d had a stroke. Who cares if she had a facelift? It’s like people talking about whether Hitler dyed his moustache. She’s an anti-abortion feminist, placing her on the list of great feminists somewhere between Peter Sutcliffe and Henry VIII.

The Tories have done a brilliant job while in power. The UK has suffered the worst fall in living standards since the Second World War. I’d add an ‘apparently’ to that as I’m not convinced downgrading from Sainsbury’s to Asda quite compares with picking dead relatives out of the rubble. Cameron says it’s time for Britain to show the world what it’s made of. Though I’m not sure exactly what you can knock together out of debt and diabetes. He wants Britons to wrap themselves up in the flag – if you’re living abroad I’d first quickly check it’s not on fire. It was Oscar Wilde who once wrote that ‘patriotism is the virtue of the vicious’, but I suspect only as it was hard to find a publisher back then who’d print the word ‘cunt’.

Still, at least the government’s got its priorities right. Removing the 50p top-earner tax rate. It’s just logic. Give the rich more money and they can ensure that troublesome youths are kept busy as gardeners, cooks and grouse-beaters.

The stories these automatonic politicians release to humanise themselves are always dispiriting. Cameron claims he’s completed every level of
Angry Birds
. Critics say Mrs Thatcher didn’t waste her time playing video games. A pity. Maybe if Atari had pulled their finger out with their tennis-game graphics the crab-nibbled eye sockets of hundreds of teenage Argentine conscripts wouldn’t now be staring mournfully through the barnacle-encrusted portholes of the
General Belgrano
.

David Cameron says he no longer cares about being popular. Well, that’s handy. Cameron doesn’t mind being unpopular because steering through the agenda of big business is more important to him than his political career and, like Blair, business will reward him amply when he goes. Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez died and thousands of Venezuelans came out to mourn his death; if David Cameron died the biggest outpouring would be against the news over-running when we wanted to watch
The One Show
. If Cameron died tomorrow so few people would turn up you’d be able to cater the funeral with a packet of Monster Munch.

• • •

I was shocked to hear of the death of Lady Thatcher. They say the good die young, so I’d just assumed she was immortal. But we must look at the positives. By all accounts, everyone now has a little more leg room around that big oval table at SPECTRE HQ. Sadly, many of her friends weren’t able to attend the funeral as they’ve been hanged at war crime tribunals. She was cremated. That’s what happens when you leave nobody in Britain who actually knows how to dig any more. The funeral brought central London to a standstill. The last time she managed that was the poll tax riots. I was all for a lavish, publically funded cremation. Right up until she died.

It’s never a tragedy when a Tory dies. The tragedy is that they never truly lived. I’m not sure that Margaret Thatcher got many women into politics, in the same way that Myra Hindley didn’t get a lot of women into hiking. All that Thatcher achieved was to ensure that people living in garbage camps a hundred years from now are going to think that Hitler was a woman.

A friend said of her that in retirement ‘the nice side of her came out’, something that only took eighty-five years and three strokes. It was speculated that Thatcher left an estate valued at £66 million in her will. It appears that she made her money by investing in a plastic-surgery company just before the Falklands War. She actually survived two attempts on her life. One being the Brighton bomb, the other when her assailant, after wrestling her onto an altar, stabbed the Daggers of Megiddo into her chest in the incorrect sequence.