Easter is the time of eternal symbols: the fictitious egg-abandoning rabbit; the female mantis, biting off its mate’s head during a loveless copulation; and, perhaps most profound, the newborn orphan lamb’s greedy suckling at the laughing prime minister’s eagerly proffered teat, a scene re-enacted every Easter by a local actor in the village of Chadlington, before a barn of frightened Oxfordshire children and their sympathetically lactating nannies.
Centuries pass, nature’s ancient cycles overlaid by each epoch’s successive blooming of ephemeral religious belief. But this year, Easter was the time of election campaigns and, tired from my standup tour but obliged to file the second of my “a comedian observes the election” columns, I was vulnerable to symbols.
On Good Friday, I took my children to Trafalgar Square to witness a re-enactment of Christ’s passion. Jesus, a charismatic Russell Brand figure from biblical times, excited a populace desperate for answers, but seemed reluctant to give specific ones, preferring to pronounce mysteriously about wineskins, his profound thoughts eventually forming the basis of an enduring bestseller.
The production was given a surprisingly contemporary air of tragedy by the 21st-century passerby’s tendency to wander along, pose for a selfie with the agony of Christ as a diverting backdrop, and then wander off again to the Trocadero centre. “Here’s me and Josie with the expiring saviour.” Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
My own Easter epiphany, during the actor-Christ’s actual crucifixion, was itself compromised by a lady from the theatre company handing me an out-of-date leaflet saying, “Buy tickets for The Life of Christ and receive 20% off The Nativity if booked before 31 March 2015.” How dare they do this in my father’s house? The actor who played Jesus was brilliant. He had to get down off the cross, clean his wounds, re-engage with the character, and then do the 90-minute show again for the 3pm matinee. Truly this man was the son of God.
The last time I’d stood all day in Trafalgar Square was 25 years and one week ago, in the poll tax demonstration, my buttocks squashed against the Imperial Units plaque by phalanxes of mounted police, unaccountable in those pre-camera-phone days, clumsy protesters bumping their teeth out against truncheons right, left and centre.
Today we know that most of the supposed troublemakers were probably undercover police officers. Indeed my first marriage fell apart four years in when I discovered that “Jean”, whom I met that very day beneath the trampling hooves of a horse named Raisa, was in fact junior police constable Alan Ripley in blond dreadlocks and a Back to the Planet T-shirt, with his winky tucked permanently between his legs.
Current legislation would make it impossible to arrange a similarly sized protest today, though driving a tank through central London to reinstate a punchy TV personality can be organised at a moment’s notice. And the massed re-enactment of Jesus’s maddeningly obtuse calls for social justice, in front of thousands of members of the public, was also fine, as no one ever listened to anything Jesus said anyway.
Though necessarily painted with broad strokes, the epic production showed how the gamesmanship of religious leaders and Roman administrators led to Christ’s crucifixion. But I found myself seeing the saviour’s face not in that of David Cameron, despite the lamb-suckler’s attempt to portray himself as our political messiah, but in the face of another idealist who, like Jesus, found himself caught in a political crossfire. You know him. His name is Nicholas William Peter Lemsip Nutkin Horsebrass Bladderwrack Clegg. The man better known to you as Nicholas “Nick” Clegg.
Nick Clegg too was betrayed, not by a kiss in the Gethsemane garden, but by a handshake in the rose garden. And, selflessly, Nick Clegg sacrificed his career, if not his life, to keep Cameron’s most savage Conservatives muzzled, so that we might not suffer quite as much as we might have done otherwise. And given a choice between him and some actual criminals, you would choose the latter, and abandon him to his fate. Nick Clegg. King of the Liberal Democrats. You did not recognise him when he came.
And now I wonder, what of that suckled lamb, the unwitting political pawn? The naked children climbing the Giant’s Causeway on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy were so traumatised by their childhood association with the group’s first dodgy album that they all grew up to be attention-seeking TV chefs – Stefan Gates, Gregg Wallace, Rusty Lee, and the Hairy Bikers. In 10 years, when you see a violent and red-faced sheep, drunkenly bleating its shame in a Cotswold field, will you recognise it as, like Nick Clegg, just another casualty of this filthy campaign?
Stewart Lee is on tour and will be at Leicester Square theatre, London, from 21 September.
