What Britain really needs now is a credible Liam Neeson figure

In the Forest of Dean, an undiscovered stone circle emerged from the moss; in the east Midlands, the former high sheriff of Derbyshire herself was swept away by floodwater; and on Remembrance Sunday, searching the cemetery for war dead, I was lead instead by a cawing crow to the hidden grave of the music hall comedian Herbert Campbell, whom Max Beerbohm thought embodied Britain herself, as “a mystical union between beef and thunder”. Stone, moss, water. Birds, beef and thunder. Strange days indeed. Can you hear me, mother?

But who would have thought the days would become so strange that the 2008 Liam Neeson thriller Taken would serve as the perfect election allegory for the Farage-Conservatives non-pact and Donald Trump’s role in enabling it? Or am I losing my mind? Bear with me. This month, I have only watched action films from the last decade, all starring a taciturn Liam Neeson. I’m 10 years late to the Taciturn Avenging Father meme, but I love Neeson’s dad-goes-mad movies and they may even have saved me.

The taciturn Neeson always plays a depressed, often suicidal, taciturn middle-aged man whose family patronise and undervalue him. But he regains his status when his loved ones are put in situations that require him to deploy the “very particular set of skills” he developed in an earlier career as a taciturn assassin, a taciturn spy, a taciturn mercenary, a taciturn policeman, a taciturn air marshal or, perhaps somewhat implausibly in Cold Pursuit, as a taciturn municipal snowplough operator.

As we all know from watching American standup comedians on Netflix, middle-aged men are the most oppressed minority on Earth right now, fact, and have been denied any sort of platform to talk about this, except for their multimillion-dollar Netflix specials. Neeson’s films tap into this sense of impotent obsolescence. Indeed, I imagine myself as the lead character in one, compelled to save my family with my own “very particular set of skills”.

And then I remember the only set of skills I ever developed was in my previous job as a horticultural researcher. And I doubt one would be able to take out Albanian sex traffickers or Russian mobsters with the Linnaean taxonomic system, however taciturn the former horticultural researcher explaining it.

Neeson’s mainstream thriller career was derailed somewhat when, earlier this year, he confessed to once harbouring murderous thoughts towards random black people, while promoting his latest thriller, the aforesaid Cold Pursuit, in which a taciturn municipal snowplough driver takes revenge on his son’s murderers by killing them with a municipal snowplough.

Due to Neeson’s comments, the proposed quadrilogy of Pursuit films is now on hold, meaning we will never see Smelly Pursuit, Sticky Pursuit, and Tiled Pursuit, in which a taciturn municipal sewage operative, a taciturn municipal beekeeper and a taciturn municipal bathroom installation worker wreak horrible revenge on their sons’ killers with some slurry, some honey and some grout respectively.

But don’t be put off watching 2008’s Taken, the near-perfect metaphor for the forthcoming Brexit election. In the movie, Liam Neeson’s 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) wants to be free to fly the nest and make her own choices, like Brexit Britain, or at least 52% (and falling) of Brexit Britain.

In Paris, feckless Kim-Britain is captured by Marko (Arben Bajraktaraj), who is in fact the head of a sex-trafficking ring and intends to auction her off to a corrupt businessman, Raman (Nabil Massad), to use and exploit for his own ends. Marko is Nigel Farage here, obviously, arranging the annexation of Kim-Britain by businessman Raman, who is Donald Trump, and even looks like him, if he were to be cast as a djinni in the Republican party Christmas production of Aladdin.

Taken’s bent French police chief, Jean-Claude Pitrel (Olivier Rabourdin), thinks he can manipulate this situation to his own financial gain and he represents Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-Frit Hulk-Smash Noseringed-Crusties Death-Humbug Technology-Lessons Surrender-Bullshit French-Turds Get-Stuffed Johnson.

But Pitrel soon finds he cannot control Farage-Marko’s followers after all and in Taken 2 he is tortured to death by an Albanian. Here the metaphor breaks down a little, as Turds’s worst-case scenario, sadly, is merely that he loses the election and is bounced back to his chickenfeed £250k-a-year job at the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, which gave my new standup show a four-star review last week.

Where Taken diverges from the reality of the Brexit election is in the absence of any credible Liam Neeson figure to save the nation. Jo Swinson previously worked for Viking FM. Jeremy Corbyn admires drain and manhole covers. At present, it doesn’t look as if either is about to beat the Brexit alliance with a previously concealed and very particular set of skills. Skills they have acquired over very long careers. Skills that make them a nightmare for people like Turds, Farage and Trump. Maybe they could bewilder the baddies with a nonstop playlist of soft rock and then incapacitate them with a heavy bit of civic ironwork.

I want to dream this fantasy into being. I want some enlarged prostate avenger to emerge from the political wilderness and say: “If you let my country go now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you and I will beat you in an election through legitimate democratic mechanisms.” But I am not sure such a figure exists. And anyway, in the words of every Liam Neeson action movie villain ever, at the end of the day: “It was all just business. It wasn’t ever personal.”

Stewart Lee’s new book, March of the Lemmings, is available now, as is a download and actual DVD of his last standup show, Content Provider. His latest live show Snowflake/Tornado, tours from January. Visit stewartlee.co.uk/live-dates