Why Tim Key’s poems are the only thing getting me through lockdown
Matt Boytwitch, Rishi Perfect, Bohnson on a swing in the Downing Street rose garden – the comedian has produced some of the greatest political cartoons of the pandemic.
The poet and comedian Tim Key is not a political man. He can express opinions on the government one-on-one, “when I’m on safe ground”, he tells me, but not, say, at a dinner party.
Yet Key's poems are some of the greatest political cartoons of the pandemic. Those he wrote in the past year – roughly one per day
– fell broadly into two categories: the things that people were doing at home during lockdown, and the things being done on the 5pm broadcasts, every day, at No 10, in the room with the flowery carpet.