It’s the year we’d rather forget, but before we do, let’s re-enter the darkness one more time – from Trump’s denial of the pandemic to Priti Patel’s policing of UK borders2020: what a time to still briefly be alive. Let’s look back on the year, after a Christmas so grim for Great Britain that it was almost as if Santa had been reading some history. They said it was political...

Turning Libya into a jihadi Mad Max should have cured Britain’s habit. But, instead of entering recovery, Cameron is just looking to score another hit in SyriaIn every addiction, a part of us is addicted to the process. Laying out the cigarette papers to build the joint; heating the spoon and flicking the syringe; dealing with our emails before our DMs; cueing up Netflix for when the kids go to...

At this year’s party conferences, the Lib Dems looked like a cargo cult, Labour was saddled with a listener, not a leader – and the Tories were happy to bung equality on the pyreAfter the second world war, Melanesian islanders formed cargo cults near abandoned airfields. They thought that if they carried out the rituals they had observed the troops performing at the American air force bases,...

The British government is only accepting migrants from camps – we don’t want the ones who cheated and didn’t wait to shout “What’s the Time Mr Wolf?”David Cameron visited a refugee camp in Lebanon on Monday. Our prime minister, a man who can normally muster all the moral authority of Roman Polanski’s penis, has discovered his soul. Amazing what a three-week break away from parliament...

Perhaps the whole debacle is a brilliant piece of marketing designed to make whoever takes over seem like a geniusMany people thought the Labour party would struggle to top the disaster of losing the general election, but it has silenced the doubters by somehow contriving to lose its own internal leadership election. Voters have signed up to support it, and Labour has reacted with a purge of such...

I'm very glad that Boris Johnson didn't die in hospital but I would like to see clawed hands rise from a vent in the ground and drag his living body into hellRead full article →

Our columnist dissects coronavirus with the gloves off - because the government has failed to provide themRead full article →

With Tommy Robinson as Leave’s salesman, a second referendum would be like a kind of racist Ragnarok, writes Frankie BoyleRead full article →

From a Dickensian Tory cabinet to the ghosts of Brexit promises past, the comedian brings you his take on the electionAs the body politic convulses, as the abyss avoids our gaze, we near the end of another election at the behest of a political class that has paid as much attention to David Cameron’s fixed terms as he did to people with emphysema slowly dying over a wood lathe. Christmas seems a...

It’s been tough to find much to laugh about this year. But Britain’s most savage satirist is going to give it a go...Consider the plight of the satirist. I know you’ve got your own plight, and there are only so many plights that you can consider at any one time, and that the plight of the satirist might even seem to you to be one of the easier plights. A satirist, you imagine, is having a...

The EU couldn’t have picked a better PM and her crack troops to lead Britain out of EuropeThe Tories are at pains to make sure that Brexit is being done by the book; sadly, that book is Lord of the Flies. If the EU had created Brexit as a deliberate The Producers-style disaster to demonstrate how difficult it was to leave, they’d probably have been tempted to tone down the casting.The key...

The Conservatives exist largely to misinform the public, to convince austerity-crippled voters they have the same interests as billionairesMany people are shocked that Theresa May having a cough during a speech is considered a sackable offence; especially from a party that could witness someone having a full-blown epileptic fit and still have them assessed as fit to drive a crane. Theresa is no...

The US president’s digital outbursts increasingly read like he’s building up a credible insanity defenceSo are we heading for a Mad Max-style future? I don’t think so. After having lived through Donald Trump we’ll surely just call him Max. Trump is behaving so strangely, we’re probably about a month away from not being allowed to make jokes about him. He’s gone past Charlie Sheen and...

All presidents come into office with something to prove, it’s just rarely their sanity. Comedian Frankie Boyle asks if the answer to stopping him rests in our handsAmerica has gone from the Obama Years to the Trump Years, like going from the West Wing to a sitcom where the incidental music involves a tuba. I actually think Donald Trump is going to prove a lot of people wrong, but sadly not...

The five-year-old king has decreed that 55 ‘bad dudes’ in Guantánamo isn’t enough. Please, somebody, put some Xanax in his food bowlPresident-elect Donald Trump says he wants to keep Guantánamo open. He wants to “load it up” with “bad dudes”, just like George W Bush wanted to in 2001. Trump says waterboarding is not tough enough, even though it was tough enough for the Spanish...

The new Tory leader will no doubt introduce a cap for migrants. Probably an orange cone with an ‘M’ on the front that gives out an electric shock if they stray too close to a golf courseThe Tory party seemed to have been blown apart by Brexit, but coalesced like the T-1000, this time taking the form of a woman. Andrea Leadsom, a sort of defrosted Theresa May, said that she was withdrawing in...

The main post-Brexit worry of Labour MPs seems to be that their vote will crumble to Ukip under Corbyn, who won’t produce enough racist mugs and mouse mats to reassure everyoneThis current divide must be especially sad for the Tories. The idea that Europe, the place where they buy their cheese, the place where they took their first five mistresses on minibreaks, the place where they cried at...

The politicians backing Brexit are all dreadful – as are all the politicians against it. Their campaigns should speak to a majority of the population but both sides seem to aim at its very worst minorityAs the EU referendum debate enters its hideous final stages, both sides of the Tory party are furiously branding each other liars, while the rest of the country thinks, “Yes, that seems...

The government insists we are prepared for cyber attack – but to be honest we’re rarely prepared for snow in winterI wrote a joke the other day, along the lines of: “Our greatest fear is that we die alone – which is why I intend to take quite a few people with me.” And it would be funnier, I suppose, if it didn’t constitute Britain’s actual policy on defence. It’s hard to make a...

The health secretary’s name is so redolent of upper-class brutality he belongs in a Martin Amis book where working-class people are called Dave RubbishOne of the worst things for doctors must be that, after seven years of study and then another decade of continuing professional exams, patients come in telling them they’re wrong after spending 20 minutes on Google. So imagine how doctors must...