Scotland’s Jesus

God, the Queen must’ve been in a lot of photos – all the official ones, obviously, and she also loves to jump in the back of tourists’ pictures for a laugh. We’ve all got our favourite memories of the Queen – mine was when she played Superintendent Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect. But she’s great for tourism. Mainly because the sort of people dumb enough to want to see her are also the ones dumb enough to pay £5 for a warm Tango and a mechanically recovered meat hotdog, and £45 to watch roller-skating cats banging out the hits of Bucks Fizz.

By way of a gift for her Jubilee, the Queen was given 169,000 square miles of Antarctica, which she accepted with her trademark gracious scowl. Barack Obama said that while many presidents and prime ministers had come and gone, the Queen had endured. Barack, that’s because you can vote for them, you prick.

Much is made of the Queen ‘not being able to answer back’. As if a multi-millionaire with access to harems of devoted apemen and to drugs that let her taste chamber music really aches to be involved in a Twitter spat. The royals actually wield a lot of power. The Queen demanded to know why hate cleric Abu Hamza couldn’t be deported. The police had been trying to arrest Abu Hamza for years but for some reason he just kept slipping out of the handcuffs.

I think it’s great that the Queen’s showing an interest in the sort of evil people who shouldn’t be in this country instead of having them over for lunch, like she did with Robert Mugabe, Mswati III, Idi Amin, Hamad Al-Khalifa and President Assad. The journo who revealed the Queen’s annoyance apologised for his breach of royal protocol, adding, ‘From now on any pillow talk stays in the bedroom . . . Oh, no, you’re not going to print that, are you?’

The royals have been unwell recently. The Duke of Kent had a mild stroke. He said he wanted to be back at work as soon as possible. It must have been more serious than we first thought, otherwise he would have remembered that he’s never worked a day in his fucking life.

Meanwhile, Prince Philip was told he can no longer hunt as it may dislodge his heart, presumably knocking it into a place where it can receive its long-dead messages of love. There’s a small metal tube that is holding his heart together. That would be a spectacular death, though, as he rips his own heart out to desperately load it into his shotgun.

I wonder if he got the NHS treatment we all get? I can’t help thinking there’s a twenty-year-old rugby player coming to in a field somewhere, his chest stitched like a 1950s football, barely able to get to his knees with his new nonagenarian heart.

I’m being unfair – the royals do pretend to do their bit for the community. Prince Andrew abseiled down the Shard for charity. He didn’t raise as much money as everyone had hoped, as he made it down alive. He had to quit as Trade Envoy due to his links with a convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. A member of the royal family shouldn’t be making us look stupid overseas. That’s clearly the job of the SAS, the MOD and Jordan. The Sun referred to Epstein as the ‘Paedophile Billionaire’, which reminds me of the old children’s rhyme: ‘The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand friends. Not one of them what you might consider babysitting material.’ Perhaps all paedophiles should be forced to have celebrity friends. It’d be an end to them being able to loiter anonymously around school gates. ‘Get in the car, kids, quick! I don’t like the look of that man playing conkers with Bono!’

Fergie took £15,000 pounds from Epstein. How many people would turn down fifteen grand, no strings attached, because it came from a child abuser? I mean, many people give more than that every year to clothing companies who tie six-year-olds to sewing machines. Fergie said, ‘I would throw myself under a bus for Andrew.’ He’d be very touched, if he knew what a bus was.

• • •

Prince Harry fought in Afghanistan. They kept that pretty quiet, didn’t they? It’s good that he went. If you want a flag waver for democracy it makes sense to send a prince. I say hats off to him. It’s about time we had a few more positive role models for downtrodden ginger people. It might finally inspire them to turn their back on witchcraft.

Harry admitted that he’s killed people, which should put an end to the question of whether he’s really a member of the royal family. Saying that he’s killed members of the Taliban hasn’t made him a target; it’s made all the gingers in the army who aren’t surrounded by personal bodyguards twenty-four hours a day targets. It shows how sensible he’s been, though. Nobody can get near you with a bomb belt if they have to be naked to get into your hotel room.

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.

2

POLITICS

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.

Thatcher was desperate to end the days of governments bailing out lame-duck businesses, determined that they should stand on their own two feet. Hence the big switch from manufacturing to banking. Nick Clegg said, ‘She drew lines we are navigating today’, mainly as we weave our way home round the various companies digging up our gas pipes.

Several MPs mentioned Thatcher’s beguiling sexuality. They say she had the ankles of a twenty-year-old – they were paperweights given as a gift by her chum General Pinochet. She did always come across as a very cold woman – I can’t help feeling sorry for poor old Denis. Going down on her must have been like licking a lamp-post in winter.

Many of Thatcher’s friends were quite emotional at the funeral. I think I saw a tear forming in the burning eye of Sauron, and when it was time for the cremation Simon Weston threw himself on, for old times’ sake. The political guest list was a damning indictment of the inefficiency of the IRA. The only thing John Major ever did of note was having sex with Edwina Currie and not getting his head ripped off like a male praying mantis. I was surprised to see Sarah Ferguson there; I’d have thought she’d have sold her ticket on eBay. Fergie had a great time, though. She could finally sit in a room full of dictators without worrying if any of them worked for the News of the World.

Osborne cried. The world thinks George Osborne is a sensitive soul. Coincidentally, the man who sold him his new contact lenses has turned up dead in a forest. I think the stress of lying to us about having no money made him finally crack when the man in the silver cape stepped into the gold box. Osborne can apparently produce tears at will, just by picturing his policies’ effects on the weakest in society . . . safe in the knowledge no one watching could differentiate between tears of sadness, and ones of joy. Of course, the saddest part of the funeral is when the curtain shuts around the body. I just have to be grateful that I found Amanda Thatcher’s hotel window in the first place.

Seeing Cameron and Clegg united despite their warring parties reminds me of Romeo and Juliet – in that I hope this ends with them both killing themselves. The deputy prime minister now holds weekly radio phone-ins. So there you go – an answer to the question, ‘Could any radio DJ be less popular right now than Dave Lee Travis?’ It’s not all bad though – as part of this job swap the Secretary of State for Business is now Tim Westwood. I can see this sneaking into other aspects of Clegg’s life – when Cameron was reading a speech the other day Clegg punctuated it by shouting out ‘Shabba’.

Clegg wants to create more construction opportunities to give young Brits jobs. I wonder how many media graduates it takes to make a docusoap about the qualified builders that will have to be brought in from Poland? He also wants to raise the speed limit to 80 mph – so that his motorcade can pass through any British city without being destroyed by angry locals.

The Lib Dems are now so extinct they’ll exist only as a memory on I Hate the Noughties, being recalled animatedly but slightly inaccurately by Russell Kane in a segment even shorter than the one about me. Most people hate all three major parties. You’d do as well to put your X straight on to the polling booth and have the country run by a collection of portable balsa-wood cubicles.

A poll revealed the Lib Dems face becoming a political irrelevance right across the UK, not just in coalition meetings. As far as the coalition goes the Lib Dems now have leverage directly comparable to trying to open a five-litre tin of emulsion with a lolly stick.

It came as no surprise that MPs voted to keep the Lords – they were never going to get rid of a second house. Nick Clegg’s worried without Lords reform he’ll achieve nothing in this parliament. Of course you will Nick. At the very least you’ll have destroyed your party.

As for Ed Miliband he has emerged as a leader more faceless than a highly buffed marble statue of a baby’s arse, whose idea of passion is undoing the top button of his pyjamas. It’s strange that he’s so forgettable because he’s got a face so weird it could make a police horse cry. I’d like to make different jokes about Miliband but we know so little about him it would literally be easier to put together a five-page Match.com profile for coastal fog.

At least no one can accuse Labour of a lack of policies or vision. I certainly felt the spirit of Nye Bevan sweep the party conference when Ed Balls rallied his troops with his proposal to part-fund a temporary reduction in stamp duty with money he hopes to raise by selling off the 4G phone network. 4G is going to be a boost for business. Salesmen tend to be way more focused in meetings if they have the technology needed to crack one off in a lay-by beforehand. Miliband has revealed he’s afraid his young sons can access violent porn on his smartphone. To prevent this from happening do what I do – before giving the phone to the kids make sure you’ve deleted the contents of the history page.