How do we know May’s Brexit plan is the fairest one of all? Every single person in the world hates it

If only someone had pointed out to Brexit supporters at some point that the reality of leaving might result in us being worse off. Still, they’ll know for next time

Well, this is strong and stable, just like she promised. It’s like announcing you’re going to have a “quiet night in”, then becoming involved in a Roman orgy, and a fight with a pelican, and ending up in intensive care after an accident with a crack pipe, then announcing it all went very much to plan.

Even more forthright was David Cameron, when he warned us: “Britain faces a simple and inescapable choice; stability with me, or chaos with Ed Miliband.” To be fair, maybe what he meant is we’d be stable if we went with him completely, and that’s true. If we spent every evening with him strolling round his country estate in Oxfordshire, or taking a break in his spare house in Notting Hill, life would probably be very stable.

It’s all been so stable and easy, that now when you hear a cabinet minister has resigned, it’s not the one you thought, as they resigned an hour ago, but now the one who replaced him that has resigned. It’s almost certain the Queen will abdicate by Sunday in protest, and Theresa May’s liver will make a statement thanking the prime minister for their long years together, but it can’t go on detoxifying proteins while Britain agrees to the wrong sort of backstop in Northern Ireland.

You have to sympathise with Dominic Raab, as the details of the plan must have come as an enormous shock to him, seeing as he had no advance warning of them except that he was in charge of negotiating them. Now he’s resigned he could become a plumber, saying to customers “I can fix your radiator for 80 quid.” Then if they reply “alright, 80 quid it is”, he can say, “EIGHTY QUID! I can’t sign up to doing it for that, what do you take me for?” and stomp up the road screaming he’s been betrayed.

The virtue of her plan is it was the fairest one possible, because every single person in the world hates it. And there are still plenty of new details to emerge for everyone to hate. We’ll probably find out it’s called Feline plus, in which we can only enter Europe if we climb through a flap, and after a transition period we’ll only be allowed to s*** if we do it in a litter tray, or in the Black Forest if we cover it up with dirt.

Jacob Rees-Mogg told us the deal will make us a “vassal state” which is a measured assessment, as one clause did demand we become a 14th-century occupied province, providing knights to Donald Tusk when he fancied a war with Turkey, and tending to Angela Merkel’s chickens.

Then Jacob changed his mind to “slave state”, which must be in the small print, after the section on beetroot tariffs, and the one that we have to row Jean-Claude Juncker’s boats while he whips us, then Susan Boyle and Eamonn Holmes have to fight to the death for the amusement of the prime minister of Luxembourg.

Several Brexit supporters, such as Iain Dale, declared this deal will leave us worse off than if we stayed in the EU. If only someone had pointed out to Brexit supporters at some point that the reality of leaving might result in us being worse off. Still, they’ll know for next time.

But nothing would satisfy the Brexit people; we could sign a deal in which we were allowed to classify the EU as a fish, and whack each EU country with a mallet on the deck of a boat, and they’d still scream it was a betrayal. The Coalition of the Fuming and the Seething would issue a statement saying “We have studied the proposed agreement and I’m SICK OF IT, we’ve been BETRAYED by EVERYONE, by EUROPE and ALL THESE OTHER THINGS and it’s not ENGLAND anymore and the road’s being dug up AGAIN and my DAUGHTER’S married a bleeding ACUPUNCTURIST what sort of a job is THAT?”

Every business is now in a state of disarray, every financial institution predicts we’ll be worse off by somewhere around eight per cent, but it will all be worth it because we’ll now be free to conclude a separate trade agreement with comets and certain species of moss.

Once an hour there’s a new attempt to scramble a solution, someone suggests a customs agreement with the moon, or free movement of labour but only in off-peak hours, so Romanians could live but only between 10am and 3.30pm, or Northern Ireland is moved to Somerset and no one’s allowed to drive a tractor without wearing a bowler hat.

And so it is, that the referendum that would finally put the argument to rest has created the most spectacular turmoil in this country for 70 years. Still, it would be completely inappropriate for anyone who argued stridently for the thing that caused the chaos to be held responsible in any way for the chaos they were told they would cause.

Because no one could have imagined it would turn out like this. I saw an interview recently, in which a Brexit-supporting MEP was asked how we should deal with Spanish objections to our proposals for a fishing agreement. And he said the Spanish would do as we say, “because they depend on our prawns for their paella, without them their tourist industry would collapse”. It’s hard to fathom how we haven’t managed a smooth agreement when our politicians are making thoughtful arguments like this.

Then on top of everything, the DUP, founded by Ian Paisley, that the government has relied on to survive, has turned out to be Unionist and loud and angry. It’s been one stroke of bad luck after another.

What a good job Cameron got his way, or we might have experienced a hint of chaos.