Python swallows Bush!

It's the kind of irony I'm sure you'll appreciate that a whole segment of working- and lower-class Americans decided to protect their children from the perils of gay marriage and abortion by voting for a government that will ruin the economy, trap them in low-wage jobs and gut the Social Security system. Now, one aspect of society Monty Python did go after was the media, which you mercilessly satirized. Are there more alternative voices in the British press now? It has the reputation for being more diverse.

It is, but it's very watered down from what it used to be. You used to have maybe 70 percent Conservative and 30 percent Labor. Now you really haven't got anybody who's Labor because there isn't a Labor Party anymore. Tony Blair's Labor Party is more right-wing than Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party. I don't know where to start, really. I suppose the Guardian and the Independent are pretty good and include a lot of alternative voices. But they still echo the vocabulary that the politicians lay down.

One thing that the BBC does that makes a good example of that is that whenever they were talking about the unions and the bosses and there was a possibility of a strike, the unions would always "threaten to strike." The bosses would then "warn of the consequences." It was never that the bosses would threaten to make all these cutbacks and the unions would then warn that the consequences would be a strike. The unions were always the aggressors and the bosses were responding. It's the same with Israel and the Palestinians. One is always depicted as the aggressor and the other is always defending itself.

Do you get most of your news from the papers?

Mostly from the Web in the last four of five years, actually, though I do read the Guardian and Robert Fisk in the Independent. There's one site called the New Standard which is very good. They had an American journalist, from Alaska, actually, who's not embedded and he's in Fallujah trying to see what's going on. Some other Web sites I like are ZNet, Le Monde Diplomatique and Tom Paine.

You've given up on television?

Yes. I just get so angry when I watch the television news. They just reiterate the government line all the time, or at least the vocabulary that the government wants them to use. It's so difficult to see what the reality is if you look at television.

And now for something completely different, if I can borrow a phrase, there's your new book on Chaucer, "Was Chaucer Murdered?" But it's really not that different, in a way, because you depict Chaucer as a writer working in a fairly open society under Richard II. Then, when a new regime comes in, under the usurper Henry IV, it shuts down considerably. Eventually this great poet simply vanishes from the historical record.

That's it, actually. My work on Chaucer and the 14th century made me more politically aware about what's happening now. I was always very unpolitical when I was growing up, in my 20s. Reading about the 14th century, I was seeing the same things going on. The people who wanted to change the world and make it better for more people had different issues, but you still see it. And the people who want power and money are unfortunately more adept at wielding power than the people who want to make things better.

In Chaucer's day it was expressed in religious terms. That's where the power was. By the late 14th century, the church had become completely commercialized and was a huge money-making thing. You had some people in the church who were just using it for that and as a power base. Those people tending to wind up running the church. Then there were people within the church who didn't like this and wanted to take it back to its earlier simplicity and more of a religious footing. It took the church establishment quite a while to realize the threat in that. One of Richard's problems was that he didn't take that seriously or support the church establishment enough and in the end it was the church establishment who took him out of power and put Henry IV in.

It was the Archbishop of Arundel who was the real mastermind behind this, the Henry Kissinger of his day. He did exactly what is happening now. He put this illegitimate, illegal regime in power and he lied and cheated to get power himself. Then he neutralized the opposition by declaring a war on heresy. A war on heresy suited his purposes because it was open-ended, he could define heresy how he liked. And he defined it as "you're either with us or you're a heretic." If you criticized the church, you were criticizing the king. It was all the same thing. You saw people using the same mechanisms and tools of power in the 14th century that are used in the war on terror today.

Do you believe that Chaucer was murdered?

I think it's perfectly possible, but we don't really know at all. By asking the question we force people to look at the political reality, which has never been mentioned. I can't believe it. People just go along with the propaganda of Henry IV. Henry IV, because he was an illegitimate ruler, was widely despised during his own reign, even though previously he'd been a popular figure, a champion of chivalry. But once he betrayed his liege lord [Richard II] and usurped the throne he was widely despised. So he rolled in a propaganda machine to rewrite the record and erase any evidence of Richard's popularity and artistic achievements. It's the propaganda that people believe.

• View blog reactions