Culture secretary Sajid Javid has said that ticket touts are “classic entrepreneurs” and their detractors are the “chattering middle classes and champagne socialists, who have no interest in helping the common working man earn a decent living by acting as a middleman”. Fill my flute with Dom Perignon, comrade, as we raise the red flag and toast Vanessa Redgrave. Because £20 tickets for my current tour have been touted to confused online consumers at nearly 400% more than their face value, none of which either I or the theatre see, and this Moët & Chandon Marxist isn’t happy about it.

I am a standup comedian. Due to a decade of tri-annual BBC2 exposure, dogged Dantean circuits of provincial comedy venues, conscious manipulation of vulnerable broadsheet opinion formers and undeserved good luck, I am now popular enough to have caught the eye of touts or, as we now dignify them, Secondary Ticketing Agents™. As Eric Cantona said 20 years ago on a celebrity fishing trip with Tom O’Connor: “When seagulls follow the trawler it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.” Well, I’m pulling my sardines out of the sea and putting them back on to Eric Cantona’s trawler. Or something.

I try to keep my tickets down to around £20 in the big theatres, and avoid ones, such as the Ambassador Theatre Group chain, where I can’t. This is not a huge sacrifice. I will put prices up if I suddenly want a velvet cloak or a bejewelled cock ring. But I am doing fine. In the last 24 hours alone I have bought muffins, a second-class single to Colchester, two quality newspapers, a dish of luxury nuts and a garage punk CD called Back to the Grave 9. I now live beyond my wildest dreams, although admittedly, until recently, my wildest dreams involved one day owning a table.

£20 is about as low as you can go in theatres, which need to make a significant slice from their standard percentage of the take. For your local taxpayer-subsidised theatre, low-tech high-return junk such as standup comedy, discredited TV psychics and Abba tribute acts float more worthwhile artists with identifiable skills – dancers, actors, puppeteers and ex-members of the Stranglers doing acoustic tours. And public subsidies in the arts temples of ballet, classical music and opera are supposed to provide cheaper tickets for everyone, not to create backdoor profiteering opportunities for Sajid Javid’s dodgy mates.

My old manager is of the opinion that comedians are only popular for a short time, and that in that time they should try to accrue as much as possible. Being a comedian was a kind of confidence trick, it seemed, that the public would eventually rumble. Then the comedian would be run out of town by an angry mob who had realised that this charlatan’s stories were not necessarily true, his jokes were just meaningless wordplay, he did the same fake improvisations every night, and his personal anecdotes had been bought in wholesale from an uncredited writer on a £60 day rate.

But I think if you can keep prices down, and come back with new stuff every year, perhaps an artist can build an audience for life. I am a Bollinger Bolshevik, apparently, because I believe I should have a final say in what my tickets cost, in order to manage audience expectation of the work itself, to control perceptions of my own apparent avarice and to make sure that money that is spent on me by punters reflects the cost savings I and the venue have cut corners to make, and the public subsidies the venue may have received, all of which are designed to make entry to the show viable, so that all sorts of people can come along and think I am shit together.

I managed to track down the individual touts selling tickets for my London run of shows, and then banned them from further purchases at the theatre. Now one of them, a “company director”, harasses me online. I wrote to Viagogo and StubHub to ask them to stop reselling my tickets at inflated rates, and they replied with standard emails. StubHub included the pointed insert, “Stewart, I would also like to mention to you that the act of reselling tickets is legal in the UK.”

I went into StubHub’s London outlet to reason with the man on the desk about the difference between “legal” and “moral” when it involved overcharging a person by up to 400%. But it wasn’t his fight, I felt sorry for him and he had obviously been trained to stick to a script involving repetition of the phrase “We just provide a platform.” I did eat a lot of sweets from a pot on the desk though, free, which was, I suppose, legal though not strictly speaking moral.

I wrote to the culture secretary, Sajid Javid, twice, but he never replied, so I sent a sarcastic email saying: “Perhaps we could go to the House of Commons bar? Are the drinks there subsidised? If so, then you won’t mind me snaffling a few bottles and reselling them out in the street at a 400% mark-up! I’m a ‘classic entrepreneur’!”

Then, as a former rock critic, I got a mass email from Iron Maiden urging fans to support the All Party Parliamentary Group on Ticket Abuse, led by MPs Mike Weatherley and Sharon Hodgson. Crack open the Cristal! The touts may have Sajid Javid in their back pocket. But they cannot defeat Iron Maiden. Bruce Dickinson is a qualified pilot and international fencing master. Iron Maiden have their own giant zombie robot, three lead guitarists and a bespoke bottled beer. I won’t be drinking it, obviously, as I am a Louis Roederer revolutionary.

Iron Maiden also have the kind of loyal lifelong following to whom they mean a lot, and who deserve not to be fleeced. In miniature, Sajid Javid’s approval of touts is part of the same ideology that sees every available inch of public life exploited for profit, every transaction monetised at every possible point, from energy to entertainment, often at the expense of those least able to afford the surcharges. How can Javid legitimise touts, making access to the arts prohibitively expensive for many, and yet also be the culture secretary responsible for the simple act of getting people through the doors to see stuff? It’s Orwellian doublethink that is beyond mockery. Which is why this column wasn’t very funny. I blame the government.

The third series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle is now available on DVD