Stewart Lee joins the Liberal Democrats

He probably looked fat and depressed when he did it, and he is certainly operating two levels of irony beyond the appreciation of his keenest fans, but Stewart Lee has joined the Liberal Democrats.

The news was announced in an Observer column yesterday:

My constituency voted 78% remain. On Wednesday, my MP was too ill to vote. I’m joining the Liberal Democrats, itself on some level a hopeless admission of defeat.

Welcome aboard, Stewart. Some of us admitted defeat when we were teenagers.

These passages in his column caught my attention:

But, with Trump’s trade deal help, at least our bananas will be bendy again. And on 1 February 2019, a man dressed as a sensible pirate will stand at the foot of an obelisk in Ripon, North Yorkshire, and blow an enchanted bendy horn, a horn only to be blown in Britain’s hour of need. And when that bendy horn is blown, as if by magic, all the straight bananas in Brexit Britain will suddenly bend once more, never to be straight again.

And:

Ripon constituency’s referendum split reflected pretty much the national percentages, at 52% to 48% in favour of the reinstatement of perpetually bendy bananas, hence its horn duty. I have already booked a room at the Weatherspoon’s in Ripon square for 2019, in order to be at the epicentre of the people’s populist banana-bending revolution. 

Weatherspoon’s owner Tim Martin, a vocal opponent of straight bananas, funded a boisterous chapbook ridiculing the insolent yellow fruits, First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Straight Bananas. And Tim has promised to be at his Ripon outlet personally on bendy banana day, handing out free bendy bananas to his regular clientele of terminally nostalgic drinkers and plucky all-day breakfasteers, toasting their own imminent obsolescence.

It did so because I have stayed at the Weatherspoon's in Ripon square. There it is in the photograph above.

I am not a Weatherspoon's fan, but it was a large, clean room with a big television and there was another pub serving the rarer Timothy Taylor's brews just round the corner. What more do you need?

I like Europe and Stewart Lee and the Ripon hornblower and its obelisk. One day we shall draw them all together.