Johann Hari

Even today, ten years after the death of its star, the snuff soap opera of Charles-Diana-Camilla rolls on. The latest plot developments still rivvet the front pages: we all know that with Diana crashing out of the picture exactly a decade ago, triggering a floral revolution on the streets of London, Camilla could finally marry her man. It seemed like the warm-hearted wind-down for a Jilly Cooper novel, a happy-ever-after for the Ugly Sister. Until this week, that is, when it became clear that Diana's footsteps really do - as Elton John's cheese-anthem put it - still fall here on England's greenest hills, at least as far as her own memorial service in Westminster Abbey goes. Camilla has been banished from the ceremony memorialising her Nemesis, and she has huffed off to a Mediterranean exile-holiday.

But this story is not just a personal drama. Beneath the soap suds, it is a parable about the extraordinary cruelty of the institution of monarchy in a 24/7 media market - and how monarchists, by perpetuating the institution, are torturing the Windsor family they claim to love.

Let's look at how the institution of monarchy wrecked the lives of these three protagonists - and will inevitably do the same to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, until the golden misery-go-round is finally stopped.

Diana Spencer was always going to be damaged by her hideous childhood, where she was abandoned by her mother. But there is an agreement among her biographers that her most disfunctional behaviour - the bulimia, the self-harm, the suicide attempts - only began after she was sucked into the monarchy machine. Her former flatmate explains: “She went to live at Buckingham Palace,” she explains, “and then the tears started. The little thing got so thin…She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her.”

No 19 year-old could cope with suddenly having every inch of her body - from her hair to her hymen - thrown open to public discussion, with her phones tapped and her body papped in an endless churn. Her family could see from the very beginning that it was leading to disaster: her mother issued a public statement during the engagement asking “whether, in the public execution of their jobs, [journalists] consider it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily, from dawn until well after dark?” It was a prophetic question. Less than two decades later, her daughter ended up speeding at more than 100mph through the streets of Paris to flee vulpine photographers, and died there, still being photographed a hundred times as she haemorraghed to death. Today, the family of Kate Middleton issue word-for-word the same warnings.

When he retired as Palace Press Spokesman in 1967, the famously reactionary Commander Colville publicly expressed his fears about the lives of the Windsors being “progressively more exposed to public scrutiny,” and he said it was necessary to draw a line between “what may be properly termed as ‘in the public interest’ and what is private.” But today, the monarchy is a rolling media roadshow, selling only itself. The kind of harrassment that wrecked Diana's life and eventually ended will persist as long as monarchy continues to exist.

It was not only the media flesh-tearing that ruined Diana's life, though. It was also the fact that the institution of monarchy had warped and deformed the personality of her husband so severely that he was incapable of giving her love and support. All of us learn our social skills from a process of trial-and-error. We do something people like, and they reward us with laughter or praise or love. We do something people don't like, and they tell us we're a fool, or wander off and talk to somebody else. But royal children never experience this. No matter what they do, people tell them they're wonderful. A friend of Charles told Nigel Dempster that “he lives in an isolation ward of flattery. He goes to Hollywood and is told he’s handsome. He swaps jokes with a comic genius like Peter Sellers and the other Goons, and they fall down laughing. He boffs a woman once, and she tells him he’s the greatest lover she’s ever had… The best education in the world can’t defend you against sycophancy on that scale.”

A man subject to such cruel adoration could never have a healthy and reciprocal relationship. But - to make it worse still - the monarchists forced him to choose an especially inappropriate bride. As Steven Barry, his former valet and friend puts it, “the women the Prince liked best…they were the ones who had experienced most.” Yet the monarchists demanded a virgin, so he could not choose the woman he really loved, Camilla. Charles' uncle, Lord Mountbatten, told Charles that falling in love was a luxury which a monarch could not afford. So he was trapped, doomed to ruin his life and his wife's, while trying desperately to carry on an affair, thereby ruining Camilla's happiness for thirty years as well.

This will keep on happening. Members of the Windsor family will always be mis-shapen by life-long sycophancy, driven half-mad by cameras stalking them every moment, and live horrible lives. A palace is little compensation for losing your privacy, your freedom, and your personality. True, the mocrahy does not seem to be on the verge of collapse. Eepublicanism has not caught on as it seemed it might in the flower-scented anger on the Mall a decade ago. But Diana week showed us how tenuous our attachment to the Windsors is. We accept monarchy partly because of affection for Elizabeth Windsor, who will not live forever (wait until you see Charles as King) and partly because we have not absorbed an important new republican argument. Far from hating the Windsor family, we republicans are the ones who want to set them free to live happy, normal lives in the Republic of Britain. It is the monarchists who want to carry on poking them with a golden stick so we can see their miserable little dance.

As we remember Diana, we must remember the real lesson of her life: in the twenty-first century, monarchy is a savage institution that should have died with her.

You can read more of my articles about the British monarchy, and why it should be abolished, here.

If you support this cause, the best group to join is the excellent Republic, which you can find here.

This is the story of two victims of a war that cannot be won and should not be fought. You have heard of the first: Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old in Liverpool who was shot in the neck as he played on his bike. You have not heard of the second: Andres Sauzo, a 24-year-old Mexican man who had his arms, legs and head chain-sawed from his body, and was found rotting in five bin bags scattered across his home town of Zihyatanejo. They are casualties – either direct or indirect – in a war that kills tens of thousands of people a year, and could end tomorrow, if we chose to.

Rhys and Andres were killed because of a political decision by the US government to wage a global "war on drugs", and demand other governments fall into line. When you criminalise a massive and growing industry – some 5 per cent of the world's entire economic activity – it does not go away. It is handed to armed criminal gangs, who flood the streets with guns to secure a slice of the riches.

This is what has happened in Liverpool over the past three decades. The city is enduring a turf-war between two local drug-gangs, the Croxteth Crew and the Strand Gang. These armed crews exist to receive, transport and sell drugs, and it is the source of their appeal. The criminalised drugs trade provides them with a fat income – thousands a month, on estates frozen in poverty. This means that they can afford the best in areas used to the worst, so the local kids idolise them and perform all sorts of criminal stunts to join their posses.

Each gang has been merrily killing kids on "the other side" for years, in an attempt to gain a part of their trade, or to stop them from trying to seize theirs. Rhys, because of where he lived, may have been seen as one of the other side's kids. Or he may have been the victim of a new, dark initiation ritual. It is almost guaranteed that the guns used in the killing of a child in Britain will have been bought with money handed to gangsters by drug prohibition. Scotland Yard estimates that 95 per cent of guns on its patch are related to the drugs trade.

Prohibition creates a need for armed gangs, as the connecting tissue between the people who grow or manufacture illegal drugs, and the millions of people who want to buy them. The Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman put it best: "Al Capone epitomises our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomise this one." We already know this was the reason for many of the shootings of black teenagers in London earlier this year: two of the most powerful drug dealers in South London were sent to prison, so a slew of gangs fought to take over their patch and their profits. A majority of the boys who were gunned down were rivals for these riches.

The drug that the Croxteth Crew and the Strand Gang specialize in – heroin – was actually safely controlled in Britain by doctors and pharmacists until the 1970s. They gave small, regular prescriptions to addicts, who in turn committed virtually no crime. This policy worked well. It was only stopped because the US government under Richard Nixon applied massive diplomatic pressure to join his country's Puritan crusade against drugs. Once the doctors were banned from prescribing heroin, the gangs stepped in, and they have grown ever since.

The scattered proposals tossed out this week to deal with drug gangs are elaborate evasions of the real issue. Banning gang videos on YouTube is barely even a sticking plaster, while the Cameroonian idea that gangs are the rancid afterbirth squeezed out by single parents simply doesn't match with the facts. Denmark has the highest rate of single parenthood in Europe – but it has virtually no gangs, except among recent immigrant communities, who overwhelmingly consist of stable two-parent families.

No: if we want to stop gang culture, we need to take back the industry that makes gangs rich, and give it once again to doctors, pharmacists and off-licenses. Legalizing drugs rips the spine out of gangs. Of course they will try to move into other industries – protection rackets, cigarette smuggling and so on – but these have far lower profit margins. In a legalised economy, the gangs would no longer be the richest kids on the estate, and could barely afford firepower, so the core of their glamour would melt away.

For a case study of what happens when you try the opposite strategy – ever-more-aggressive prohibition – we need to turn now to Andres. His is a case I stumbled across when I was reporting from Mexico last year, a fleeting News in Brief remembered now only by his family. After his mutilated corpse was found in black sacks, the undertakers wanted to cremate him, but his family insisted on the traditional open-casket coffin, now filled with carved chunks. Soon after, they began to be plagued by telephone calls from gangsters demanding to know where Andres's girlfriend was, so they could cut her up too. His mother, Gomez, was too scared to call the police; as a report put it, "she just changed her phone number and prayed."

Andres was killed by a gang who believed he was trying to muscle on to their patch. He is one of 2,000 such victims there in the past year alone. In Liverpool, drug gangs control about 5 per cent of the economy, and that's enough to cause misery and chronic fear on their estates. In poor countries like Mexico and – to a much larger extent – Colombia and Afghanistan, they can become rich enough to out-gun the local police, and effectively take over whole swathes of territory. Mexican politicians know this privately. Vicente Fox, the last President, explained in an interview that legalisation was the sensible solution – but later nervously acknowledged that the US wouldn't stand for it.

The new president, Felipe Calderon, has followed US orders more closely: he has been sending in the army to crack down on drugs cartels. This has had no effect on drug supply – in fact, the street price of cocaine in the US has actually fallen, indicating higher supply – but it has caused the rate of drug murders to double. Why? As one gang is broken up and jailed, a slew of new gangs fight it out to control their old patch – just as in London, and everywhere else. Civilians, often kids, are caught in the crossfire.

Whatever we do, chronic drug use will be a tragedy for the individual addict. But this policy of drug prohibition converts the tragedy into a disaster for millions more. It is flooding our country – and much of the world – with gun-toting gangs whose weapons kill dozens of people like Rhys and Andres every day. How many more have to be shot or carved up before we bankrupt the gangs through legalisation, and transfer all the money we burn on chasing them into rehab and prescriptions for addicts?

If you support ending the global war on drugs, the best organization to support and donate to is the brilliant Transform, whose website can be found here. You can read more of my articles about this war - and its victims - here.

As it bleeds into its fifth year, the Iraq war is excelling only in savagery and surrealism. We now have an American President publicly citing the similarities to Vietnam as a reason why the US must not withdraw – and he is merrily quoting Graham Greene’s anti-war masterpiece ‘The Quiet American’ in his defence. Far from thinking anything has gone wrong, he declares: “I think the Iraqi people owe the American people a great debt of gratitude. That’s the problem here in America. They wonder whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.”

Meanwhile, the Iraqi psyche is so wrecked by the 7/7 blasting onto their streets 24/7 that my Iraqi friends report mass hysteria gnawing into the survivors. After a small string of attacks by badgers – you know, the little furry creatures - in Basra, so many people were convinced this was a new weapon of war that UK military spokesman Major Mike Shearer had to announce publicly: “We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area.”

The last excuse the remaining defenders of the war can scrape together is – yes, but it’ll be even worse if we leave. As David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq, recently said: “If you don’t like Darfur, you’re going to hate Baghdad [after a US withdrawal].”

Buried in all the incoherent self-serving propaganda pumped out, there is a serious dilemma for people genuinely worried about the Iraqi people. What if a genocide begins to unfold in Iraq after the withdrawal of international troops? There are harbingers of it already. The jihadi suicide-massacres of the Yezhidis – a harmless, tiny religious sect - in Northern Iraq last week is only one signal. The Iraqi writer Nir Rosen warns: “There are no non-sectarian Iraqis left, no non-sectarian militia, and no physical space for those rejecting sectarianism. Even secular Sunnis and Shia are embracing sectarian militias because nobody else will protect them.”

I have been startled by how viciously even my democratic, liberal Iraqi friends now talk about The Other Side in sweeping, annihilatory language. Almost every institution of the Iraqi state – the police, army, even the hospitals – are now bisected into Shia and Sunni wings who detest each other. What we are seeing in Iraq today is, in slower motion, what happened in India and Pakistan sixty years ago: the hellish ethnic cleansing of mixed areas, until everyone is trapped in homogenous blocks. There is a real and hefty risk that this will metastasize into an attempt to physically eliminate one of the groups. There is also a risk of the neighbouring countries invading, turning it into a Congo-on-the-Tigris, with the Saudis marching into defend the Sunnis, the Iranians invading to protect the Shia, and the Turks invading to prevent the creation of a mini-Kurdistan in the North.

But is this a case for keeping the US forces there? A recent, much-discussed-in-DC article in the New York Times by Brookings Institute scholars Michael O’Hanlan and Kenneth Pollack said so. They argued that ‘the surge’ of 21,000 troops into Iraq is finally working, and creating momentum away from sectarian violence.

If this was true, it would be important - but their own Institute’s figures show it is the opposite of the truth. It makes no sense to compare statistics on violence in Iraq month-to-month, because the violence fluctuates seasonally (as it does in most cities in the world). For reliable figures, you have to compare this July to last July. And what do you find in Brookings’ statistics? Iraqi military and police killed are up 23 percent. The number of people killed in multiple fatality bombings is up 19 percent. US troop fatalities are up 80 percent. The size of the insurgency is up 250 percent. Attacks on oil and gas pipelines are up 75 percent. The refugee outflow has doubled. Hours of electricity available per day are down 14 percent. Far from creating the space for political compromise among Iraqis, the Sunnis and secularists have marched angrily out of the Maliki government. This is success? This is momentum?

The US troops cannot be an agent of anything positive in Iraq, after using chemical weapons in civilian cities, after using torture routinely, after overseeing the death of 650,000 Iraqis. Today, 78 percent of Iraqis say the US presence “is doing more harm than good” and should leave. This is hardly surprising: the former US soldier in Iraq Jeff Englehart said recently: “The general attitude was, a dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.” The current US strategy – of building up a ‘national’ army and police force that consists essentially of violent Shia militias – may actually be unwittingly preparing the forces for a genocide.

Nor can the US keep demanding Iraqi politicians “sort it out” and build an army capable of taking over the country at once. It took a decade to build something resembling a national army in Bosnia, and that was after a comprehensive peace agreement. The US is demanding the Iraqi politicians build one in just a few years, in the middle of a civil war, and put it to work on behalf of an unpopular occupying power. It is an impossible task.

So how do they get out without leaving behind something even more hellish? This question isn’t just a propaganda ploy by the Bushies to justify staying longer (though it is certainly that too); it is a genuine moral problem.

To grope for a solution, we must first need to be honest and clear about the Bush administration’s motives. They are currently trying to force the Iraqi parliament, as its top priority, to pass an oil law that would hand two-thirds of Iraq’s oil fields to their friends and paymasters in Big Oil. This fits with what they have been saying is their real motive in Iraq for decades. In 1977, Paul Wolfowitz wrote: "We... have a vital and growing stake in the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israel conflict." In 1990, Dick Cheney - then Defence Secretary - said of Iraq and Kuwait: "We're there because the fact of the matter is, that part of the world controls the world supply of oil."

The claim that the likes of Shell and Haliburton have to be brought in because only they have the know-how to excavate this oil is simply untrue. In 1972, Iraqi oil shifted from the control of the same foreign corporations to the Iraqi state. Output didn’t fall, as Big Oil menacingly warned. It trebled. Ordinary Iraqis see this plan as looting of their wealth, with 63 percent appalled in a local poll. Yet the US is suppressing resistance: they leaned on the Ministry of the Interior to use old Saddam-era laws to ban the oil worker’s trade unions who have been democratically, peacefully fighting the law. It demonstrates what former Republican Senator Mike DeWine said recently: “We’re not in Iraq primarily for the Iraqis, we’re in Iraq for us.”

Only massive public pressure will change this Bush course. So what should we demand they do? An immediate withdrawal with no replacement forces could indeed leave a genocidal vacuum. That’s why former Senator George McGovern, who heroically fought against the Vietnam War, has worked out a detailed way out of Iraq that doesn’t leave behind a holocaust. It is mapped out in his book ‘Out of Iraq’ – and it begins with a simple apology from the US, Britain and other invaders for the catastrophe we have wrought – the opposite of Bush’s deranged demands for thanks. There must then be a commitment to dismantle all permanent US bases on Iraqi soil, and to allow the ownership of Iraqi oil by all Iraqi citizens – with the royalties divided equally between every Iraqi and paid out as a regular cheque, like they do in Alaska.

The US then needs to convene a regional conference, at which they pledge to pay full-whack for an international stabilization force to police Iraq, manned exclusively by Muslim countries like Morrocco, Tuinisia, Egypt, and Jordan. These countries will need all sorts of financial inducements to send troops. Tough. Pay them. McGovern calculates that even at top-rate, this would cost $5.5bn – just 3 percent of keeping the US forces there for the next two years. Once the police are fellow-Muslims, the often-murderous insurgents will be much more isolated. Al Qaeda’s tiny presence (estimated by US generals to be fewer than 500 fighters) will be even more despised. Only troops like this could have the legitimacy needed to stop a genocide.

It’s not a perfect plan. People will still die – losing the only life they have – in the fallout. But it is better than any other option I can see. In Baghdad today, people have stopped eating fish from the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. The reason? So many dead bodies are being dumped there every day – and being munched by the fish – that Iraqis began to fear they would contract the diseases associated with cannibalism. We have reduced Iraqis to consuming themselves. Now what was the President saying about gratitude again?

POSTSCRIPT: Bush’s argument-by-analogy that the US was wrong to leave Vietnam because of the ensuing holocaust perpetrated by Pol Pot next door in Cambodia is so historically illiterate it’s hard to know how to answer it. I was ruminating on it and thought I'd add some other points.

By the time the war ended in 1975, the US invasion had caused the deaths of 3.3 million Vietnamese people, according to Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defence for much of the slaughter. The Vietnamese countryside was collapsing under the weight of the chemicals and explosives dropped on it. The only way ‘forward’ – as Richard Nixon’s old henchman G. Gordon Liddy told me in an interview – was to “bomb the Red River dykes. It would have drowned half the country and starved the other half. There would have been no way the Viet Cong could have operated if we had the will-power to do that.” This would have been even worse than the communist tyranny that eventually consumed Vietnam.

As for the catastrophe in Cambodia, there is near-consensus among historians that the psychopathic Khmer Rouge was a tiny, irrelevant fringe in Cambodia – until the US started fire-bombing the country as an extension of the Vietnam war. Only then did the terrorized Cambodian people became more receptive to extreme solutions. US actions in Vietnam didn’t prevent the Khmer Rouge; it enabled their rise. After 1979, the Us – including Bush’s father – supported the Khmer Rouge with arms and slatherings of cash too.

You can read my article about why I think I was wrong to support the Iraq war here, my wider analysis of the pro-war left position here, my article about the mercenary armies unleashed on the country here, and my article about the disastrous economics of the occupation here.

You can support the Iraqi trade unions - the most brave and secular democratic force in the country, currently being savaged by both the jihadi fanatics and the US occupation - at this site: Please give what you can.

Hooray for secularism, boo for people who spend more than twenty seconds a day thinking about how they look...

Personally, I hope Peter Tatchell wins. (The secularism award, obviously. I think his clothes are always good. But then, the fact I think that - with my dire clothes taste - might be a sign they are in fact terrible.)

In August, every last granite crevice of Edinburgh - this 18th century Scottish city on a hill - becomes infested with Comedy. Every building, hut, toilet and phone box is requisitioned for Laughter, and if there’s any room left, they fill it with new metal portakabins to make you chortle and spew some more. As the stand-up Nick Doody puts it: “If you’re in a car accident in Edinburgh and the ambulance is a bit late, they’ll set up a show in your guts. When you come round, the doctor will say – the bad news is you’re going to lose your legs. The good news is – you’re now venue number 1674, and the show’s getting rave reviews.”

If you know what makes a country laugh, you know what it fears and dreams and despises. So I decided to go in search of the funny-bone lying deep in the flesh of Gordon Brown’s Britain. Let’s start our trawl as most of its practitioners do - with a long lash of depression.

The skinny, slight Simon Amstell is best known as the acidic host of ‘Never Mind the Buzzcocks’, but here he is offering a late-night dose of despair. “Is there anything worse than being alive?” he asks. “People think death is worse because they don’t know what it’s like. I’ll tell you what it’s like – less bother.” Looking bleakly out into the blackened auditorium, he declares, “When somebody says to me, ‘I’m having a baby’, I say, ‘Really? You know who else had a baby? Everyone. You’re just furthering the cycle of misery.’”

The source of this misery is a man. Amstell began to row with his boyfriend last year, and started trawling into the fetid bogs of Eastern spirituality for a salve. His logic was: “There’s a personality clash here. So I had to take my personality out of the equation.” He began to trawl into the Buddha’s thought and concluded: “The idea we are individually significant is illusory. You know this is true when a friend shows you their photographs. You think, I don’t care, I can’t be bothered – oh, is that me?” He tells a man in the audience, “You think you have an identity. You have glasses, so you’re the guy with glasses. But when a crisis comes along, you think, I’m more than that. Actually, you’re less. Much less.”

Amstell could easily get away with serving up a few lukewarm gags for a drunk, late-night audience who just wants to see that bloke off the telly – but instead he offers a probing, cerebral show that has stretched far beyond it. “I thought about buying a cat,” he explains, “but then I realised a cat isn’t going to make me any less lonely. It’ll just provide a mascot for my loneliness.”

He speaks not just for everyone who’s ever been dumped, but for a disconnected, disengaged chunk of Britain, sitting in their own trendily-furnished boxes waiting for the world – or some meaningful cause – to come bursting through the door. It doesn’t. He ends declaring, “If you ever feel you’re too depressed to go on – don’t. Obviously, don’t kill yourself after this show though, because that’s not a good review for me. It’s one thing to say ‘I died laughing’, but not to say ‘I laughed then I died.’”

Will Hodgson seems, at first, to be from another Britain far away. He is a big-bellied 29-year old with a pitbull face and a high, high mohican – dyed bright pink. “At many points in my life I’ve been a miserable failure,” he explains in his warp-speed Essex burr. “I was a miserable failure at being a skinhead at 17, a miserable failure at wrestling school in my mid-20s, and since the age of five I have been a miserable failure at collecting My Little Pony dolls.”

I sit up. There’s something original and odd here. Hodgson whizzes through his obsession with My Little Pony, interspersed with anecdotes about what particular animal tattoos mean in prison, before adding with a frown: “Skinheads are a much more liberal group than you have been lead to believe, but they draw the line at My Little Pony lesbian weddings.”

So many ‘character’ comedies feel contrived; this has the acrid tang of authenticity. Hodgson guides us through the pubs and kebab shops of Chippenham: one of them “is the kind of place you should go if you are ever pissed off with having two eyes.” Another is somewhere “they might as well put the rohypnol in the drinks when they serve them.”

Hodgson introduces a theme that keeps recurring in Edinburgh’s comedyathon: a sense we are all living in a processed, plastic environment, trapped in our own inaunthenticity. He caught a late-night show on ITV2 called ‘The 150 Worst Moments of the 1980s,’ and explains: “If you’re a bankrupt coal-miner watching your son inject himself with heroin, don’t worry – at least you’re not Timmy Mallet, who was officially the worst thing about the entire decade. That makes him the worst person of the 1980s too, which must be a great relief to Peter Sutcliffe.”

Hodgson’s is a voice pining for reality – including real women. “I’d climb over Paris Hilton to get to Fern Britton – should such an unlikely scenario ever occur,” he says. “Having sex with Paris Hilton would be like sleeping with a giant bar of Toblerone you’d dipped in Ronseal.” Hodgson drags onto the stage a country dismissed – not least by repellent snobbish stand-ups like Jimmy Carr and Tom Stade – as “chav Britain”. “If you see any posh kids wandering around dressed as ‘chavs’ to promote their show, kill them,” he says, and I cheered.

But Britain is racked not just by resurgent snobbery, but by the resurgence of foaming religion too. As always, its greatest comedic foe here is Stewart Lee, who boats in the title of his show that he is now officially “the 41st best stand-up ever” according to Channel Four’s incessant, inane list shows. Wandering onto the stage with his hands in his dark-suited pockets, he explains he is currently itching to begin shooting a documentary called ‘March of the Mallards’.

The Christian right seized hungrily on the movie ‘March of the Penguins’, because as it followed our waddling Antarctic friends, it found they believe in monogomy and family values. See! It’s natural! Well, Lee tells us, “Mallards are the only creature that reproduces exclusively by gang rape. They have been captured on film indulging in some recreational homosexual necrophilia. So I want a film where Morgan Freeman says in the narration: ‘There goes that mallard taking the other dead mallard in the ass – in a dance as old as time.’ There’s nature.”

Lee’s atheism is part of an old English empiricist tradition. He doesn’t offer the angry anti-clericalism of the French philosophes, but a wry and mocking raised eyebrow at the absurd claims of the faithful.

This scepticism extends too to the feelings of the public too. He says: “I am very sceptical about anything the public vote for, especially when it comes to comedy, where you have no taste or judgement.” Exhibit A is the fact that whenever we are asked to vote for the funniest TV moment ever – ever – we vote for Delboy falling through the bar. Was it funnier than Peter Cook satirising Macmillan in the 1950s? Yes, he fell through the bar. Was it funnier than Chris Morris’ Brass Eye? Yes, he fell over. He was standing up, then he fell over. It’s the funniest thing there’s ever in my member of the public opinion. Ever. It’s just as well Sir Isaac Newton didn’t share the sense of humour of an average member of the public. He would have been so amused by the simple effect of gravity he would never have conducted a comprehensive study of its causes.”

After Lee’s laconic style, it takes a moment to acclimatise to the hoarse Aussie bark of Brendan Burns – although his rage against religion is just as great and just as righteous. “Somebody trying to blow themselves up to convert us all to Islam, and not killing anyone else, is hilarious,” he yells. “If you see any comedian who isn’t joking about it, they’re not doing their job. I want tickets to the next one. I’ll be there roasting marshmallows. You want to convert Britain to Islam? They haven’t even converted to Christianity yet. They haven’t even converted to the fucking metric system. And you’re offering no drink, no sex, no music, and at the end you burn yourself alive? Sign me up!”

One of the most dessicated clichés in the comedy critic’s vocabulary is to call a stand-up show “a blast” – but Burns’ really is a blast. He screams and shouts and punches his way across the stage in a recovering-alcoholic rage. The poster for his show makes it look at first like a tedious anti-PC rant: it shows Burns in blackface, then in a wheelchair impersonating a disabled person, then mocked up as Christ on the cross, and asks: ‘So I Suppose This Is Offensive Now?’

But actually Burns is offering something much more interesting than that. With a blunt honesty, Burns is trying to tease out what we can legitimately joke about together. He loathes racism - “I don’t celebrate Australia Day, in much the same way I don’t celebrate Hitler’s birthday. Two hundred years of genocide? It’s not for me” – but he wants to be able to mock cultural differences he finds depraved, like forcing women into burquas. He says, “If you take the piss out of culture, people get uncomfortable – but isn’t culture something I do because my granddad did? And don’t we take the piss out of grandad a lot?”

Burns illustrates this conflict within comedians with a real, live twist, as shocking as the shockers in ‘The Crying Game’ or ‘The Sixth Sense.’ It would be a crime to give it away, but the audience leaves thinking about racism – and their reactions to it – in a burning new light.

All over the fringe, comedians are being forced to defend their right to offend. The excellent, under-rated young stand-up Nick Doody has been chastised for saying Madeleine McCann’s parents were right to visit the Pope “because if anyone can find a paedophile…” He explains in his set: “Just because you make a joke about something doesn’t mean you find the subject itself funny. To laugh at a knock knock joke you don’t have to find doors hilarious. But people are looking for offence. Why did the chicken cross the road? I can’t believe you’d say that! My mother was pecked to death by a chicken!”

But Jerry Sadowitz – the Glasweigan-Tourettesian veteran stand-up - takes this offensiveness shooting off into the stratosphere. He wishes death on Heather Mills-McCartney (“she’s two-thirds of a fuckin’ person”) and says things about the McCanns and assorted other public figures that cannot be published in a family newspaper. In fact, they cannot be published in any newspaper, except perhaps the Cromwell Street Gazette. “My glass is fuckin’ empty and cracked and it’s no’ even there because some bastard stole it,” he rasps in between offering card-tricks to the audience, as if he was the bastard child of Tommy Cooper and Fred West. There is one moment of accuracy in his set: Sadowitz yells, “The only way I’m getting back on telly is if I’m kidnapped by fucking Iraqis.”

If Sadowitz is edgy, though, Rick Shapiro at the Green Room is over the edge, off the cliff and bleeding to death in the valley below. Shapiro is a former prostitute and heroin addict who shambles on stage and snaps, “You guys are looking at me like a bunch of radiation victims.” He begins to mumble and flail for a few minutes, before pleading: “Stay with me because I am so desperate to snort cocaine and shoot heroin and crawl off the stage and die right now. Imagine if suicide was for you just eating lots of chocolate ice cream. That’s what it’s like in my head.” It sounds smooth on the page. Imagine it said with a stammer and a crazed flickering stare.

This isn’t stand-up – it’s crawl-across, with Shapiro dragging himself across the stage and twitching. He periodically yells, “Help me!” His director has to yell “Come on Rick!” from the back of the room from time to time, causing him to snap back, “You don’t know what it’s like to be off your medication when the voices in your head aren’t friendly.” It’s hard to separate the comedy from the disintegration: at one point he has a hacking cough and says, “I got AIDS but I’ll beat it.” It takes the audience a few beats to realise this was actually a joke. There are a few good lines that spasm out of him - “If a woman’s a good lay, don’t call her a whore. Call her again” – but all I really remember is my growing fear that this might be the first stand-up gig since Tommy Cooper where the act literally dies on stage.

If Burns and Shapiro water-cannon you with angry testosterone, the most intriguing trend on the fringe is towards a very different kind of comedy – one that offers you a warm bath of oestrogen. Josie Long is the queen of this new school, which I think of as Organic Comedy. It usually involves lots of home-made props, hand-written diagrams, and a whimsical, upbeat glow. It is the polar opposite of the glib, flavourless speed-comedy of a Jimmy Carr, offering instead something slower, more intimate, and stripped of the comedy-pesticides of cynicism and sneering.

Josie (and with her easy intimacy, you quickly think of her as ‘Josie’, not ‘Long’) is a scatty, dreamy twentysomething who begins her show ‘Trying is Good’ absent-mindedly saying to the tecchie, “Oh God, sorry, I was miles away.” The central image of her show comes from something she spotted in the local swimming pool at the start of the Festival. They have built a floating assault course for the children to play on, and there is a man – “an actual adult man”, she says – whose job is to hose the children off if they get too far. “What does he say at dinner parties when people ask his job? “Actually, I power-hose children off a floating assault course.”

Josie spotted one fat kid clinging desperately – and successfully – to the course, with a look on his face that said “At last - victory! Of sorts.” And she figured: “I would always rather be a fat kid on a slide than the bastard with the hose.” Her show is a celebration of people who invest effort – “no matter how misplaced.” It is a catalogue of people who delight her, and whatever the opposite of misanthropy is – proanthropy? – she is full of it.

This kind of comedy is hard to capture in written snippets: you can’t bottle charm. Josie takes her audiences skidding along great wide rainbows of whimsy. To give a small taster: says she loves rollercoasters because “it’s like somebody you don’t know coming up to you and saying, ‘If you give me £2 I will shake you.’ And you say, ‘Yes.’ Then they say, ‘If you give me £2.50, I will give you the chance to win a toy to the value of ten pence, along with the illusion that you are good at sports.”

Josie’s organic comedy style is spreading into something like a movement here, and it is an artistic cousin of the Mumblecore movement in American independent cinema. Both are stripped-down reactions to a crass commercial culture of pulp products and pulped minds. Both are trying to retrieve the personal and the intimate buried beneath the plastic and tinsel and wrapping paper of our corporate culture, and they are all frightened of being squeezed into a deadening 9-5 culture that smothers personal creativity.

Issy Suttee’s show ‘Love in the Retail Industry’ is one of the most beautiful examples, consisting of nothing but a sweet, slight Northern girl, a guitar, and a voice you want to swim in. With this, Suttee creates a love story in a supermarket in Matlock that washes away all the bad taste left in your mouth from enduring foul rants about “chavs”.

Hers is a dreamy world, depicted with love, that reflects a forgotten chunk of Gordon Brown’s Britain – the one working on tills but dreaming of being in a band, who sings with a wry smile: “Somewhere over the rainbow/ There’s global warming./ And a black charcoal cloud slowly forming…/ If there’s a pot at the end of the rainbow/ It’s full of piss.” Yes, this is a school of comedy that makes you gurgle rather than belly-laugh – but it also offers a worldview that urges you, for all its sadness, to find happiness in the scattered moments of authenticity and tenderness between human beings. It’s not just a style of comedy; it’s a philosophy of life.

But what is missing from this picture of British comedy? There are only a few straggling political stand-ups left here: the always-dependable Andy Zaltzman made the best point of the festival when he said, “Next time scientists have a report on global warming they should issue it as a fuzzy video from a mountain lair in Afghanistan. Then we’ll be terrified.”

Yet mostly, political stand-up has stood down. I think I know the root of the problem: George Bush has killed political comedy (and hundreds of thousands of people). The laughs in his strangulated English – and in a Vice-President who shoots an old man in the face, mistaking him for a quail – are so obvious they don’t need to be amplified by a guy with a microphone. The same goes for the Carry On Up the Jihad attacks on London and Glasgow last month.

Instead, we are left with a softer, sadder picture of Britain from the clouds of laughter that hang over Edinburgh. It is of a country that is, in the main, wealthy - but oddly unsatisfied with our lives. We are uncomfortable talking to each other, not even sure of what language to use. We know there are terrible threats out there – global warming, jihadism – but don’t feel we can do anything about them. There is no grand national story here - just the scattered stories of depressive break-ups with our boyfriends, kebab shops in Chippenham, and an attempt to retrieve some reality from a mass-produced husk. I have found Britain’s funny-bone – and it’s black and fractured.

It's the last in the series! I am still weeping. Only a big hug from Davina has saved me from suicide.