The satirical artist collective Led By Donkeys describes the Labour government as “fair game” and says it is inconceivable that the group will not hold them to account in the coming years.

“We are not naive about Labour,” said Ben Stewart, one of the group’s founding members, after it made headlines this week by targeting Liz Truss.

Truss was in the middle of voicing her support for Donald Trump’s campaign to recapture the White House in November when a remote-controlled banner was lowered behind the former Conservative prime minister at an event in Suffolk, depicting a giant head of lettuce and the words: “I ruined the economy.”

Truss said: “This is not funny” and left the stage. She later issued a statement on X saying Led By Donkeys were “far-left activists” who were using the stunt as a means to “intimidate people and suppress free speech”. She added: “I will not tolerate this.”

Stewart, one of the four founders of Led By Donkeys, activated the banner from his seat in the audience, but would not explain how the group pulled off the stunt, saying only that they had no help from inside.

“It was somewhat challenging, but I can’t tell you how we did it,” Stewart said.

He deliberately chose the moment when Truss “sided with the far right in America” to take down the banner.

Her reaction was “completely predictable,” he said. “It was absolutely typical. We discussed it beforehand and said she would say, ‘That’s not funny’ and walk off the stage. It was almost as if she was working from a script. It’s just a script that we all know.”

The group had pulled a similar stunt on Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, during the June election campaign. The banner featured a picture of Russian President Vladimir Putin with the words “I ♡ “Nigel.”

Stewart said: “Farage is better at reacting on the fly. He tried to go through with it and he did quite well for about 30 seconds – and then his temper came out. Basically he revealed something interesting about himself because he said: ‘Whoever colluded with the venue, we’re going to get them fired.'”

Led By Donkeys was formed after the Brexit referendum in response to the “lies, madness and hypocrisy” of the Brexit campaign. “It felt like the country had reached a new level of chaos,” Stewart later said in an interview.

The group began by making posters and posting their work on social media. Within weeks they had raised hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations and became more sophisticated in their messages.

Over the next few years, the chaos intensified, providing satirists with ample material. Now Led By Donkeys faces a new political landscape following the Labour Party’s landslide general election victory. All of its work is publicly funded.

“We don’t believe we’re going to live in a red rose utopia,” Stewart said. “We don’t yet know the contours of this government, we’re not sure how it will govern. But there’s no doubt that it will disappoint us in some, if not many, ways.”

“Led By Donkeys is an accountability project, so it is unthinkable that we don’t focus our attention directly on what the government is doing. The project is not tribal.”

But the group also intends to put a strong focus on the far right following recent unrest across the country. “We have a major far-right threat in this country. What we saw bordered on an attempted pogrom against British citizens,” Stewart said.

The group is “deeply concerned that leading British politicians, who should know better,” are supporting the street actions. “And we are seeing leading conservative figures supporting Trump,” Stewart added.

However, this “in no way precludes looking at what the Labour government is doing, where it is heading and what contribution we can make to holding it to account”.

Occasionally, the four founders of Led By Donkeys would discuss in the pub who deserved the title of “Donkey No. 1,” Stewart said. “It changes sometimes, but one name is always present: Nigel Farage.”