ALEXEI SAYLE is the only child of two members of the Communist Party, a fact that is the wellspring of his identity and his humour. I was a “burned child,” he says.

So, given the need to rebel against your parents, does he have an Oedipal relationship to the Communist Party?

“Actually, yes,” he laughs. “It’s the stuff I’ve been going on about all my life, a rich source that has never run dry. I love it, but I want to kill it!”

“But it’s complicated. My mother always said: ‘You can’t make an omelette without murdering 40 million people.’ It’s the definitive joke…”

This Alexei Sayle is not the Comedy Store clown of old, but a thoughtful, reflective, undefensive man who has time for an hour’s chat before his book launch.

“I had a complete comic persona until I stopped doing stand-up in 1996,” he says, “and then to have discovered a completely different way of doing it in my sixties and seventies is something I’m very proud of.”

The completely different method is to have become a writer, and in the middle of that self-imposed task, to have honed his art in the superb Radio 4 series Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar.

“In Sandwich,” he explains, it’s about “a way of putting across a political point of view, but wherein there is always a critique of that point of view within the telling.” And “I’m tremendously proud of it. It’s amazingly dense, a really complicated piece of art.

“Some of the recordings were so joyful that I thought they should stop comedy now. This is its apotheosis. And…” he goes on, “I used the word ‘genocide’ in Sandwich bar which I doubt any other radio comedy has done.”

The book to be launched is his brilliant, acerbic memoir How I’ve Tried To Change The World By Walking Down The Middle Of The Street Shouting. It’s different from his previous memoirs Stalin Ate My Homework (Sceptre, 2010) and Thatcher Stole My Trousers (Bloomsbury, 2016) because this time it is feature-length Sandwich Bar, both shorter than the other books (you read it in one sitting) and more total.

Ignoring his career path into celebrity, it tells the story of a life punctuated by protesting in the street, from the H-bomb, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, to the miners’ strike, Iraq and Gaza. It’s a brilliant structure, in equal parts hilarious and informative, that addresses itself exclusively to “we who march.” It is as though being present at a protest is the true source of his identity.

How did he arrive at this way of addressing his life?

“The book was a struggle,” he says. There a moment “post-Corbyn and pre-genocide” when his publishers pointed to a clear desire for political books, “short polemical books by comedians,” and suggested the title “How to be a socialist.” The result was “a really tormented process, endless drafts” of a book that wasn’t working. He gave up. But then, after October 7 2023 and the advent of the Palestine marches “I felt compelled,” he says. “Given the rage, and the situation we were in, and still are in, and Gaza is in. I felt obliged to push on.”

In order to sidestep the inconvenience of celebrity he invented the parallel life of another Alexei, a frustrated lecturer in media studies at Clitheroe Teacher Training College, and for both he and this plausible fame-less alter ego it was Gaza that “brought them back to left-wing politics.”

Sayle never really left the left (even if one of the chapters is subtitled 1990-2000: A Decade of Failing to March and Basically Not Thinking Too Hard about Things) and has a long history of doing Palestine benefits. So what makes the difference now, and what has changed in the political atmosphere of Britain?

It wasn’t just the hundreds of thousands marching, he says, but because “the darkness is nearly upon us.” These protests “are wonderful things. Entirely miraculous. The best of humanity.” But the it is hostility with which they have been met that is the real lesson.

“It’s the oligarchy showing people what will happen if they stand up to the power of the wealthy. Denoting Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. Debanking The Canary. Using AI programmes to surveil people. The technology being used: it’s a showcase of repression.”

There are, he says, “moments of ecstasy and moments of terrible depression that spread across all of these marches.”

The book takes aim at Keir Starmer, of course, but unfortunately “the bastard f**ked me up by retiring.” He says it with a laugh. But he doubts the new regime will make a difference. “Whether anything has changed in the Labour Party is questionable. Miliband by his own description is a zionist. The two-state solution is a ridiculous fantasy. And I suspect we’ll get disillusioned with Burnham because he’s in hock to the same forces that Starmer was.”

But you can tell he’s glad to be back in the fray and to channel that collective rage with a finely honed political art.

“Comedy,” he says, “relies on getting that laugh every 20 seconds,” and every outraged sentence of the new book caresses historical fact with a delicately administered sarcasm, in a uniquely delicious manner.

It is, I suggest, some achievement to have transformed his entire life into an instructive sarcastic monologue. Is he the people’s self-appointed ambassador between politics and art?

“I couldn’t think of myself like that,” he replies, and there is a pause.

“Look. The character I most identify with in Animal Farm,” he says, “is the cat. The cat is the criminal classes, who only get involved in the revolution at the very last minute. The cat is self-sufficient. He looks after himself and is very cynical about the whole experiment.”

“I’ve been around. I’ve been on Desert Island Discs and Sky News. I’ve tried to expose the Campaign Against Antisemitism. But I’m not entirely in the fight. I’m dodging in and out.”

His honesty as a secular British Jew with communist credentials has a refreshing note of self-awareness.

“I’ve just tried to take it as far as possible as a public entertainer.”

It’s been a long road and, right now, the riches are on full display.

How I’ve Tried To Change The World By Walking Down The Middle Of The Street Shouting is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £12.99.