The Brexit analogies that explain our calamitous times, from an exploding python to a cheese submarine

We are all now so fatally exposed there is not an object, person, event or bodily function that cannot be usefully harnessed to represent the startling farce of a country bent on needless self-harm

Brexit is like… well, a lot of things it turns out. If there is one area of life that has prospered in the painful 1,000 years that have passed since the 2016 referendum it is our desire to somehow capture its ludicrous essence.

Journalist Zoe Williams thinks it’s like a brutal breakup in a romcom, except not funny. Our own Mathew Norman thinks it’s like being strangled alive in a sadomasochistic game, except without the climactic finish.

JK Rowling thinks it’s like Trump’s wall; Radiohead’s Thom Yorke reckons it’s like the early days of the Third Reich.

Much like Brexit itself, the analogies are endless: it is a screaming child; an exposed nipple in a wardrobe malfunction; a planning meeting for the Fyre festival. It is a black hole that devours all light, or a Premier League team asking to be relegated.

Many of the best examples have been posted and shared on Twitter. We’ve collected an extraordinary top 20 in the gallery below.

Maybe you agree that Brexit is like Geri Halliwell, as one poster claimed during an anti-Brexit march in October 2018, or at least like the moment when she “overestimated her viability as a solo artist”.

Even the Daily Express, the arch-Brexiteer rag, seemed to delight in the description of Brexit as a submarine made out of cheese. Proper British cheese, no doubt, although it will turn out the submarine company actually owns no cheese submarines whatsoever, and has copied its Ts & Cs from a local fondue restaurant.

You don’t like cheese? Well everyone likes tea. The comedian James Acaster invited us to consider a peppermint brew with the bag in – stronger together. Take it out and the tea is weaker. The bag “goes directly in the bin”.

The Independent’s Tom Peck has told readers Brexit is like the Burmese python that tried to swallow a 6ft alligator whole and accidentally exploded. More in the visceral/animal genre came from an unnamed Labour backbencher who compared Brexit to “half a horse”.

“You can either have the head or the arse. But ultimately it’s going to bleed to death.”

Maybe it’s a pantomime horse? Less gory. Some would have David Cameron and Nigel Farage both playing the back end.

Former World Trade Organisation boss Pascal Lamy says Brexit is like “trying to take the eggs out of an omelette”. Kiwi TV correspondent Joy Reid thinks it’s like unscrambling eggs.

Maybe you prefer your Brexit sunny side up? Yeah, well bad luck. There are no optimistic Brexit analogies. Zero.

Even Shanker Singham, the Institute of Economic Affair’s pro-Brexit trade guru, can only muster a comparison to “playing a multi-dimensional chess game”. Good news Shanker! Someone actually reverse-engineered the famous Star Trek 3D chess set and rules. Their conclusion? “It’s one clumsy piece of s***.”

Type “Brexit is like…” into Google and the only succour for the Leavers is the autocomplete result “Brexit is like...ly to happen”. Its apparent inevitability is the only flicker of consolation.

And so we labour onwards, ploughing through the slaughtered horses, exposed nipples and discarded egg shells. No wonder an act of political futility seems to have inspired such a flood of creativity. The only thing left is to try to crystallise our famously nebulous Brexit into something more tangible.

Like, perhaps, a screaming child or a Spice Girl. At least it’s not the slow-motion train wreck (credit: Yanis Varoufakis) that we witness playing out in real time on the green leather benches of the Commons or in forlorn flying visits to Brussels.

Maybe the reason it seems too easy to conjure up this infinite flow of analogies, metaphors and cod philosophy is that Brexit not only means Brexit, it now encompasses everything. It has flopped its vast palpitating stomach over the entire country and we’re left suffocating in the rolls of fat.

We are all now so fatally exposed that there is not an object, person, event or bodily function that cannot be usefully harnessed to represent the startling farce of a country bent on needless self-harm. Try it. Think of anything. A carvery lunch, a mole, a phone charger, the opening titles of the sitcom Bread, the junction of the A53 and A54 just outside Buxton. Everything is Brexit, and unlike Geri Halliwell’s solo career, it will never, ever end.