Larger-than-life TV personalities should be using their fame to highlight the connections between thinktanks, media outlets and policymakers – not pretend they don’t exist
The discredited television personality Andrew Neil, formerly the laughing launch-face of the seemingly Ofcom-untouchable, fun-packed, fact-averse, rightwing TV station GB News, floats contentedly in a foaming brown bathtub of bubbling human waste, his Weetabix hair matted with muck, and yet considers himself clean, the nutshell king of infinite filth.
On 10 April, Neil told his social media followers: “The hard left throws about ‘Tufton Street’ the way the hard right throws about ‘Globalist’ and ‘Soros’… It’s become a cover for them to avoid thinking/analysing.” Meanwhile, the same Dubai-based Legatum Group that owns half of Neil’s former employer GB News also boasts the Russian oligarch-coddling life peer Matthew Elliott of the Tufton Street thinktank Vote Leave and the Tufton Street thinktank the TaxPayers’ Alliance as a senior fellow of its Legatum Institute. There’s nothing to see here, says Andrew Neil, a gaping Sooty for the fist of Tufton Street’s pullcinelean Harry Corbett.
Stewart Lee introduces Giant Sand, the Dream Syndicate, Kristin Hersch and Josephine Foster at EartH in London on Saturday 27 April and his new live show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf, opens in London in December before a national tour
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