His last name is not any part of how he got this gig, I’m pretty sure. He has been around the UK comedy (topical/political/musical branch) circuit for years, especially known for composing and performing a topical song about one of the week’s news stories every week on The Now Show for the best part of two decades.
Oddly, his Wikipedia entry makes no mention of his regular contributions to The New European, which is not “an unknown website” over here. They popped up in 2016 as a remain campaigning newssheet and today are still on the print newsstands with a modest circulation (about a third of PrivateEye’s, for reference) but no doubt many more readers online. Some of their other regular contributors are even better known (maybe not to a US audience, but certainly are to a UK one).
Writers such as Booker-prize winner Howard Jacobson,
Bonnie Greer, Miranda Sawyer, Jonathan Freedland, Victor
Lewis-Smith, Louise Chunn, Alastair Campbell, Mitch Benn
and Hardeep Singh-Kholi have set the agenda regularly
from within the pages of The New European.
