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The craft-beer tossers of Led By Donkeys need to call it a day

Their dumb stunt against Liz Truss is proof that the anti-Brexit snobs are running out of steam.

Brendan O'Neill

Brendan O'Neill
chief political writer

Topics Brexit Politics UK

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Led By Donkeys is back. Every beardy podcast bro’s favourite campaigners have carried out another of their rib-tickling stunts. Which trembling political figure did they target for wry ire this time? The new chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, perhaps, for her Thatcherite slashing of the winter-fuel payment to millions of pensioners? Or Keir Starmer, indeed, given the country’s gone to riotous ruin in the six short weeks he’s been PM? Don’t be daft. Our valiant speakers of truth to power have gone for the real threat to Britain in 2024: Liz Truss.

Yes, the woman who was prime minister for 49 days in 2022 is the latest prey of the Brewdog ballbags from Stoke Newington. Most people say ‘Damn, I forgot she was PM!’ upon hearing Truss’s name. Not the tedious, tache-sporting Remoaners of Led By Donkeys. Oh no, they hear Truss’s name and think: ‘Let’s get her!’ And so it was that in Beccles in Suffolk last night, where Truss was taking part in a public event, down came a Donkeys banner with a picture of a lettuce and the words ‘I crashed the economy’. Who will they go for next? Norman Lamont? David Mellor?

The dream-like Truss administration seems so long ago that I had to go on Google to remind myself what the lettuce thing was all about. Ah yes, it’s a reference to the time the Daily Star did a livestream of an iceberg lettuce next to a pic of Truss to see which would last longer: the vegetable or Truss’s prime ministership. It was the vegetable. That was mildly amusing in 2022, but imagine still chortling about it in 2024, when not only Truss but all the Tories have been booted out of office. It wasn’t Truss who looked like an arsehole in Beccles last night – it was her Guardianista tormentors with their sixth-former sniggering over a gag all normal people have forgotten.

‘That’s not funny’, Truss was heard saying as she was hurried off stage. It’s the truest thing she’s said. Led By Donkeys have got to be lamest, least-funny members of the entire wankerati. Founded in 2019 in a hip pub in Stoke Newington by four white men called Will, Ben, James and Oliver who love to sup a Camden Hells – I wish I was making this up – Led By Donkeys is an anti-Tory, Brexit-hating stunt group. They do ‘witty’ Tory-bashing projections on to big buildings and billboards in order that people called Barnaby might have something to titter at as they cycle to work.

They’re loved by the kind of people who quote-tweet Marina Hyde articles with the word ‘HOWLING’ and who have never let one single St George’s Day pass without saying ‘He was Turkish, you know’. Their big bugbear is Brexit and us muppets who backed it. Indeed, from the lofty perch of their alcove in the Birdcage pub in Stoke Newington, they once told a fangirling Guardian hack that they ‘deliberately [choose] Leave-voting areas to put up our posters’. See? The centrist dads of the metropolitan echo chamber do occasionally venture into left-behind Britain – to put up posters essentially telling the plebs there what dumb shits they are.

With incalculable courage, the four north Londoners once even went to Dover. They were ‘nervous’ stepping foot in this ‘Farage stronghold’, recounts the Guardian, as if they were colonial explorers setting off for the ‘dark heart’ of Africa. They put up four posters in the dead of night before returning to the safety of their leafy London suburb long ago gentrified of its chav populace. The posters were ‘stripped off’ the billboards the next day. Funny that. Almost as if the good folk of Dover don’t take kindly to having the long, moisturised finger of turbo-smug London wagged in their faces.

Now, the craft-beer cunts are back, speaking truth not to power but to a little-mourned, largely forgotten former PM who isn’t even an MP any more: Truss lost her seat in the General Election. As the Express says, people are puzzled. Why are these ‘tedious wankers’ not going after ‘the actual government that leads us now?’, they want to know. It’s simple – because Led By Donkeys was never about holding the powerful to account. It was just naff, bourgeois Tory-bashing. It was the campaigning version of those mirth-free comics on crap panel shows who say ‘Bloody Daily Mail!’ every 30 seconds. It was a spasm of conformist middle-class contempt for the Conservative Party and Brexit and the ill-informed plebs who voted for them.

Labour winning the election is actually one of the worst things that’s happened to the puffed-up moaners of the Brexitphobic set. For now everyone will see, clear as anything, that their concern was never with keeping government on its toes, but rather with giving ceaseless public vent to their own dinner-party prejudices. Tories evil, Brexit dumb, GB News dangerous, yada yada. Now that their buddies are in power, now that Britain is ruled by people who also listen to The Rest is Politics and flinch when a white van goes by, they don’t know what to do with themselves. Like those Japanese soldiers who stayed in the jungle long after the Second World War, Led By Donkeys squeals ‘Fuck the Tories’ even as the Tories are nowhere to be seen.

Their tragic fate, their humiliating execution of nostalgic stunts against a non-existent government, should be a wake-up call to the rest of the cultural establishment. Comics, columnists, playwrights, pop singers, influencers and others have spent years signalling their virtue through Tory-bashing. Hating Boris and Brexit and all the rest of it became the thin moral glue holding together a chattering class horrified and alarmed by the voting habits of faraway oiks. Sans that glue, they’re going to fall apart, aren’t they? What will last longer: the lettuce in my fridge or Led By Donkeys’ piss-poor, pointless campaigning?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

Picture by: Getty.

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Topics Brexit Politics UK

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