Satirical artist collective Led By Donkeys say the Labour government is an easy target and it is inconceivable that the group will not hold it to account in the coming years.
“We don’t have an idealistic view of the Labour Party,” said Ben Stewart, one of the group’s founding members, after it made headlines this week when it criticised Liz Truss.
Truss was voicing her support for Donald Trump’s campaign to regain the White House in November when a drone banner was placed behind the former Conservative prime minister at an event in Suffolk. The banner featured a giant head of lettuce and the phrase: “I have wrecked the economy.”
Truss said: “That’s not funny” and walked off the stage. She later issued a Statement about X He said Led By Donkeys were “far-left activists” who used the stunt as a means to “intimidate people and suppress freedom of speech”. He added: “I will not tolerate it.”
Stewart, one of four men who created Led By Donkeys, activated the banner from his seat in the audience but declined to explain how the group pulled off the stunt other than to say they had no inside help.
Liz Truss’s talk interrupted by a lettuce banner – video
“It was a challenge, but I can’t tell you how we did it,” Stewart said.
He consciously chose the moment when Truss was “aligning herself with the far right in the US” to take down the banner.
Her reaction was “totally predictable,” he said. “It was absolutely on brand. We had talked about it beforehand and said she would say ‘that’s not funny’ and walk off the stage. It was almost like she was working from a script. It’s just a script that we all know.”
The group had carried out a A similar trick with Nigel Farageleader of Reform UK, during the June basic election campaign. The banner featured an image of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, with the words “I ♡ Nigel.”
Stewart said: “Farage is better at thinking on his feet. He tried to cover it up and did a pretty good job of it for about 30 seconds, and then his temper came out. He basically revealed something interesting about himself, because he said: ‘Whoever conspired with the venue to do this, we’re going to sack them. ’”
Led By Donkeys was formed after the Brexit referendum in response to the “lies, madness and hypocrisy” of the Brexit campaign. “It felt like the country had reached another level of chaos,” Stewart later said in an interview.
The group began by putting up posters on billboards and posting their work on social media. Within weeks, they had raised hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations and their message became more ambitious.
In the following years, the chaos worsened, providing satirists with a wealth of material. Now, Led By Donkeys faces a new political landscape following the landslide victory of the Labour Party in the general election. All of their work is funded by the public.
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“We don’t think we’re going to live in a rose-red utopia,” Stewart said. “We don’t know the contours of this government yet, we’re not sure how they’re going to govern. But there’s no doubt that we’ll be disappointed in some ways, if not many.”
“Led By Donkeys is an accountability project, so it is inconceivable that we would not pay direct attention to what the government is doing. The project is not tribal.”
But the group also intends to continue targeting the far right following recent unrest across the country. “We have a deep far-right danger in this country. What we saw was on the verge of an attempted pogrom against British citizens,” Stewart said.
The group had expressed “deep concern that leading British political figures should know better” and were supporting action on the streets. “And we are seeing leading conservative figures supporting Trump,” Stewart added.
But that was “by no means exclusive of looking at what this Labour government is doing, and where it is going, and what contribution we can make to holding them to account”.
On one occasion, when they were in the pub, the four founders of Led By Donkeys argued over who deserves the title of “number one donkey”, said Stewart. “It changes sometimes, but there is one name that is always there: Nigel Farage.”
