The idea is the easy bit. What’s harder is to put it into action.
Like all social justice warriors, from the early Superman bringing an unscrupulous mine owner up before the courts to Doctor Who regenerating through a rainbow of possibilities, Led By Donkeys have their own origin story. It opens in a pub in Stoke Newington where four friends, nursing drinks, raged against the machinery of an apparently amnesiac press and its failure to ask questions of those whose falsehoods and empty promises had swayed the narrow majority in the Brexit referendum. How might the public respond, they reasoned, if those lies could be made to explode in their faces, ideally plastered across a 12-sheet billboard?
Drunk with the possibility of the idea, their thoughts – informed by various experiences of working with or alongside Greenpeace – moved beyond theory and into practice. It turned out that hanging paper on ‘borrowed’ billboards was harder than it looked. Still, after anxious hours of improvised wallpaper paste and slapstick wrangling with the oversized sheets, their efforts paid off. The Guardian’s Marina Hyde – a well-placed contact – retweeted their first poster, damning David Cameron in his own tweeted words, capturing the public’s attention so that the post spread like a novel virus through ineffective Personal Protective Equipment. Led By Donkeys had announced their arrival.
Half of the quartet take to the stage of Manchester’s Royal Northern College of Music; Ben John Stewart and Oliver Knowles, the latter still on police bail while facing a potential charge of public nuisance for his alleged role in projecting a short history of Trump’s encounters with Jeffrey Epstein onto Windsor Castle during a recent state visit. That intervention is very much emblematic of their practice, which feels at times like a kind of British Situationism, countering the pageantry of the official version with carefully-staged spectacles of their own.
Hosted by Alex Clark, channelling the convivial irony of a panel host on Have I Got News For You, Ben and Ollie reveal themselves as genial raconteurs, spinning yarns with the disarming charm of seasoned chat show performers. Their knack in doing so lies in their taking themselves far less seriously than they take their aims, casting themselves as latter-day counterparts of Wolfie Smith, the 1970s sitcom revolutionary, in the misadventures that have imperilled their good intentions, whether it’s being caught up in a preposterously sedate speedboat chase in the aftermath of having renamed Michelle Mone’s yacht The Pandemic Profiteer, or finding themselves face to face with Liz Truss’s close protection officer after ambushing her talk with a slowly descending screen from which a lettuce declared ‘I crashed the economy’. Liz might not have seen the joke, but a packed audience at the Royal Northern College of Music most certainly does.
Their most concrete achievement to date, both literal and metaphorical, has arguably been the National Covid Memorial Wall which faces the Houses of Parliament on London’s Albert Embankment. Devised in collaboration with the Covid-19 Bereaved Families For Justice campaign, at least in part to demand an inquiry into the Johnson administration’s catalogue of belated response and ‘preferred status’ commissioning, from the first hand-drawn heart it grew from being a potential act of criminal damage into a moving monument to the loved and the lost.
With the right to protest increasingly under threat, and within the framework of a social media landscape in which attention spans are short and opinions increasingly partisan, Led By Donkeys perform a unique public service in holding to account those (such as Farage and Trump) for whom politics has become a kind of extended improv act, by leaving their own, more compelling mark on the permanent record. Crowdfunded to maintain their independence, long may they continue battling against lies, be they bus-emblazoned, driven by Tufton Street ‘think’ tanks, government sanctioned, or X-magnified.
By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent
Manchester Literature Festival
