Look who sent me a birthday message! Bloody cheek!
You can read the interview I did with Intel Lady, published in the Critic, November 2025 issue, below: I am speaking to my favourite satirist, Jenny Stanton, on Zoom, and she is trying to turn off her backdrop. Otherwise known as Intel Lady, Stanton’s best known parody is of former deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner, speaking to the nation from a bunker, filled with cans of lager, cigarette butts, and a framed photograph of smug, woke radio presenter James O’Brien. I point out to Stanton that she has captured the perfect image of O’Brien looking an absolute plonker. “I don’t think he can look any other way, can he,” she replies, laughing. I got to know Stanton after messaging her on X to thank her for providing me with endless entertainment, and have followed her rise to internet fame ever since. Stanton was born into a happy, hardworking family in Leeds in 1979. She started to become interested in acting in her final year of secondary school, having accepted that her first love, music, was not going to be the career for her. “I was obsessed with music, played the guitar, wanted to be a rock star, and then I discovered that I could act. I was a bit of a shit guitarist, and not that great a singer either. It turned out that I was a better actor than I was musician”.Studying performing arts at college, she was advised to go to drama school. “But I thought, do I want to saddle myself with debt for the rest of my life?”Taking what she calls “the scenic route”, she subscribed to The Stage and (between cleaning jobs) applied for as many auditions as possible. She was 19 when she secured her first ever paid acting role, as a street theatre performer at a major theme park. “My favourite job was a cleaner at one of the big bank call centres in Harrogate. I loved that because I didn’t have to bloody talk to anybody,” she says. “I could just be in my own little world, running audition pieces through my head whilst hoovering carpets.” In 2004, Stanton auditioned for a part she was desperate to get – a drama series about the building of the Titanic. “I’d never auditioned at TV studios before, it was an overwhelming experience,” she recalls. An agonizing week later her agent called to tell her she had been offered the part. Prior to this, Stanton had been a touring theatre actor, “which means I was poor,” she laughs. In true Titanic style, the shoot was an utter disaster. Filmed that summer, on location in Liverpool, it rained so heavily that some of the trailers floated away. The director decided to move to a studio. “But on that day, there was a heatwave,” she says, “and everyone was in their full-dress corsets and layers of clothing, sweating like mad.”Months later, Stanton heard the terrible news that her scene had been cut, because it looked so unnatural. “I ended up as nothing more than an extra,” she says. “All I wanted was my name in the Radio Times, because that means you’ve made it. I was gutted.”She stopped acting professionally when pregnant with her son, born in 2007. Five years later, she had a daughter. Both children were subsequently diagnosed with autism, and Stanton gave up acting to care for them.However, the lure of performing eventually drew her back, and in 2021, during lockdown, she introduced Intel Lady to the world. “The name was inspired by the QAnon grifters (far-right conspiracy theorists) I was covering. They all had ‘insiders’ with ‘intel’. So I created a character who used to feed them complete claptrap. I would answer the phone with “MI5 paid asset helpline, how many I help you?”Stanton soon tired of these people, “because they’re insane and they’re not going to change”. Looking around at what else was going on, she landed on the Johnny Depp - Amber Heard trial, so parodied that. “And then I started looking at politicians”.Her first victims were American: former US Vice-President Kamala Harris and liberal commentator Rachel Maddow – but it wasn’t long before she set her sights on British politicians Nadine Dorries and Liz Truss. Then she looked to the opposite side of the bench, and Angela Rayner caught her eye. “I started covering her in 2022, and, when Labour were elected, realised she was going to play a prominent role in government. So I worked really hard to get her right”.In 2024, Stanton released a video of her perfected parody. Set in a filthy hotel room in Ibiza littered with empty champagne bottles, it featured a swimsuit-clad Rayner, asking “Why is everyone getting upset, just because I was having a dance and enjoying myself?”It was a colleague, Rik, who came up with the idea of moving Rayner into Lord Ali’s apartment, with the backdrop exactly as it had been when Starmer once did a speech from there. The idea was a keeper. “She would always allude to it as her ‘mate’s apartment’. “All declared, all above board.”Stanton explains how the infamous backdrop came about: “One day a crumpled-up can of Tennents [Lager] appeared behind me, slightly hidden by one of the framed photographs of James O ‘Brien. And then the next time, a full ashtray appeared and then, a clothes horse with knickers on it and bras hanging off it.”She says that some comedians think the only things it is acceptable to laugh at are Trump, Farage or Brexit, but that she doesn’t have a political agenda. “Anyone is fair game,” she says. “I find humour in pretty much everything, even the most horrifying situations. I think it’s quite a British thing.”In her recent Big Brother parody, one contestant gets called into the Diary Room for the crimes of misgendering, homophobia, and disability discrimination. Another character is Carol, a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainer for the NHS, who Stanton loves to play. “The jokes are ridiculous… because it’s their world. It’s their language. It’s crazy to regular people.”People keep asking Stanton how she writes. She says, “It’s all ad-libbed. I go into character, I press record, you’re in character. It usually takes me between five and sometimes 15 attempts to get it right – or the doorbell rings”. She first became aware of her own rising popularity when Tracy-Anne Oberman started following her. Stanton was shocked, “I was checking that it was her real account”. But then a private message came, saying, “I love your No Brainer with Angela Rayner, it’s bloody genius. Keep doing it”. Not long after that, she saw that “somebody called JK Rowling” had followed her on X. “I thought, let’s see, they’ve got two followers or something, and I clicked on it, and I had to sit down because it actually is JK Rowling, she’s actually following me!”When Comedy Unleashed asked her to do Rayner in a tiny Westminster pub called The Speaker, Stanton knew it would be a dream come true for her to perform there, and panicked. But then there she was, “stood on a crate on top of beer barrels”, wearing a hard hat, hi-vis, a really ugly pink dress and “the worst shoes you’ve ever seen” before an audience of bewildered journalists and politicians who had no idea who she was. Stanton describes that evening as the weirdest, weirdest night, but her Rayner triumphed: “I don’t know why everyone’s getting upset. It’s not even a banter ban. I don’t know why you’re calling it a banter ban because it isn’t that. It’s about respecting people’s boundaries and not saying offensive stuff, that’s all.” Stanton says she’s “very fond” of Marjorie and Gerald from Just Stop Oil. “I think it’s hard not to love her because she’s just ludicrous. And it’s that cantankerous old lady vibe that people just are too frightened to argue with. And Gerald has become such a creep. He started out with a slight bladder weakness and now he’s turned into a piss fetishist.”The minute Just Stop Oil popped up on the news, Stanton knew she had to cover them. “The activists are the most bonkers,” she says, and found it hilarious when she got a “barrage of abuse” from people unaware it was satire. “They told me they hoped I’d get run over and stuff. And I would just come back to them in character because it was just too good not to. I could spend hours a day just responding to them and laughing my socks off”. I ask about plans to develop new characters. “There’s always room for more. I try and just keep my eye on what’s going on in the news and the celebrity world. And if something catches my eye and I think they are worth the parody, then I will parody them,” she says. “If you’re in power, I’m going to cover you, especially if you’re ridiculous, even better.”Does she have plans for Reform and Farage? “Oh yes! When Reform get in, and I think it is more of a when, than [an] if, I will be keeping a very close eye on the ladies in the party.”With the world as crazy as it is right now, with Green Party activists shouting ‘Queers for Palestine’ at its annual conference, and Emma Watson doing a reverse ferret on JK Rowling, Stanton will not be running out of material any time soon.I have one last question for her. How did she feel when she heard that Angela Rayner, one of her most famous caricatures, had resigned? “I was gutted, as I love playing her. But she will definitely be back! I have a theory that she’ll do ‘I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here’, in which case, I will be all over it.” So will I. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit juliebindel.substack.com/subscribe
