o combat corona, the government are reassembling the Isaac Levido-led team that won the election. The virus is sure to be defeated by cynically re-edited footage of Keir Starmer appearing confused or by faking Facebook posts and temporarily renaming the Conservative party website coronavirusgohome.com. You cannot beat Covid-19 with lies. That plague ship has sailed. Dominic Cumming is in a sealed-off cellar somewhere, his two-headed dog of deceit irrelevant in this particular fight. Currently, I am trying to write humorous content that is future-proofed against the unexpected incapacitation of its subjects. After Michael Gove appeared to give a doorstep interview while squinting through clouds of steaming urine vapour, I hoped to elaborate further on the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster’s heroic struggle with gasses. But now he is self-isolating, this would seem tasteless. Hopefully the member for Surrey Heath has some medicinal powders stashed away somewhere for his hour of need. Likewise, for nearly a year, I have been referring to the prime minister by an ever-elongating name composed exclusively of lies he has told, crass things he has said and racist remarks he has made. But as I file this piece on Wednesday morning, the PM is in intensive care, so it would be a terrible error of judgment to do so now. Indeed, the PM’s role is delegated instead to the secretary of state, Dominic Dover-Calais Foodbank-Cashflow Feminist-Bigots Childish-Wishlist Lazy-Workers Wage-Scaleback Toss-Denier Britannia-Unchained Duty-of-Candour Break-Up-the-NHS Daily-Superfruitpot Raab. In 2018, the former Brexit secretary became the victim of indiscreet revelations concerning his relationship with Pret a Manger snack fruits, but he remains characterised by his harsh views. Everyone knows someone in the health service working 12-hour shifts in corona-infested spaces, ignored by politicians and the press, with only paper facemasks for protection, threatened with dismissal if they complain. Hopefully, Superfruitpot will continue to support the workers he considers overpaid in the monolithic NHS he wants scaled back, with its childish wishlist of public health-based hopes. On Tuesday night, Superfruitpot said the PM will beat the virus because he is “a fighter”, a comment that tells you all you need to know about Superfruitpot and his colleagues’ mindset. Mortality has a morality. Those who die do so because they did not fight to survive. And that is also why, in simpler times, they are queuing at foodbanks, demanding pay and rights and clogging up a potentially perfect world with their inadequacies. Vote Conservative! In enforced downtime, I seek answers in plague-inspired stories. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011) features an American sex tourist copulating with a pliant pangolin in a 5G communication mast above an outdoor Chinese restaurant, their dripping spillages contaminating the bat-based delicacies below, a narrative now accepted as genuine by most US voters at the behest of the president himself. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, set in 1665, sees the desperate populace turning to religious charlatans, medicinal mountebanks and a clearly unqualified fitness instructor in clinging fustian hose, who becomes breathless after the briefest exertion, but nonetheless engorges the silk knickers of anxious wives and desperate serving girls. The Plague, written by Albert Camus in 1947, takes place in Algeria and proves that all viruses are foreign. My copy is inscribed with a sticker saying it was a prize for acting at my minor public school. I was out of my depth, on a part scholarship and a bursary for “orphans, waifs and strays”. I realise now that I was acting then, I have been acting ever since and I am still acting now. Who is this socially transplanted charlatan, spewing gobbledygook in a quality newspaper? This is beyond my ability. Everything is. Such self-doubt is common in isolation. We lie awake in the unexpected silence, brains engorged with particle-free air, our wet hearts pumping in our dry midnight mouths. Do I placate the children with quasi-religious platitudes or tell them the disordered cosmos is without meaning? To this end, I have unearthed the board game Eldritch Horror, based on the works of the racist fantasy author HP Lovecraft. Players attempt to save the world from the malignant cosmic entities who created the universe, but nonetheless mean us only harm. My seven-year-old loves it and has taken to doodling images of multi-tentacled space-octopi strangling her immediate family to death. Everything is fine. There is nothing to see here. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (1927), recently filmed in pungent purple tones by the exiled visionary Richard Stanley, sees a poisonous, life-eroding presence enter our world. Drunk in the dark on canned M&S slimline gin and tonics, I dreamed last night this Lovecraftian deity was none other than The Market itself, mankind subservient to its demands, an entity that wants to press us back into service of its self-sustaining agenda, irrespective of the human cost. Let the market decide! Social distancing is a socialist intervention!! Strange signs support my paranoia. Health secretary Matt Handcock continues to cough, at a succession of politically inappropriate locations, a spluttering, skull-faced banshee, foretelling disaster. A ceramic fox is seen through the patio doors of the self-isolating Sky newsreader Stephen Dixon, staring unceasingly at the camera, an omen of woe. And at night, Adam Boulton’s collapsing face and chapped lips resemble a mask worn by some other creature and he seems to burp repeatedly mid-sentence, as if an obscene being that dwells within him is trying to communicate using flatus. But Contagion offered hope. Once tested, citizens are given wristbands that allow them back into society. But hysterical doom-dongers say habitat destruction, immune-system deficient animals and drugs in the food chain mean a whole bunch of corona-style viruses are locked and loaded and ready to rip. Is this the new normal? Will we end up with entire forearms full of different coloured wristbands, one for each vaccine, like teenagers who spent the three months after A-levels attending every music festival going, still wearing the memories, not wanting their last childhood summer to end? You can download Stewart Lee and Jane Watkins’s 2007 comedy drone Pea Green Boat, with all proceeds to Trussell Trust food banks, from Go Faster Stripe until Wednesday, with content by other comedians to follow