Who cares about food and medicine? Brexit is the best nightly entertainment show Britain has ever had

Every detail seems designed to make Britain look gloriously stupid

Surely everyone’s enjoying this now. It’s such chaos that if someone in the House of Commons popped in an amendment to confirm that Britain after Brexit becomes a village in Lapland, it could easily slip through by accident – and we’d be committed to replacing the rail network with reindeer.

Each night the news sounds like American football commentary, as presenters tell us: “That’s a 303-258 reverse on the amended amendment facing a return with 85 per cent ERG follow through going forward onto the Article 50 extension. That’s a helluva backstop, how do you see this one playing out, Jed?”

It’s quite possible Theresa May has already resigned, but no one could hear her as she’s lost her voice, so there will be a constitutional crisis as lip-readers argue whether she’s still prime minister, and Michael Gove insists her coughs spelled out “I think we should do whatever Michael wants” in Morse Code.

We’re so used to this hopelessness now. If Fiona Bruce said, “We’re going live to the House of Commons” and all the MPs were naked and the speaker yelled “RELEASE THE LIQUID” and custard was poured over the benches while Emily Thornberry paddled through it in a canoe until John Bercow shouted “The TRIFLES have it, the TRIFLES have it”, most people would groan “Oh no, not more Brexit” and turn over to curling on Eurosport.

There should be a rule that once an hour, Liam Fox is reminded live on the BBC that he once said this would be “the easiest deal in history”. If Fox had been in charge of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, he’d have told his team as they set off: “It’s going to be jolly warm so I hope you’ve all brought plenty of factor 50 sun cream and a deckchair.”

Every detail is designed to make Britain look gloriously stupid. Having insisted the EU wouldn’t amend the deal, the prime minister rushed to Strasbourg this week to find she’d been right in the first place, but had to insist she’d been wrong all year and they had amended the deal. Next time she should save money, and dash round Ealing on a milk float, or shout “Surely you’ll vote for my deal now, I’ve just done 20 lengths of High Wycombe Leisure Centre”.

Because it looks as if she will try for a third time to pass her deal that’s already been beaten by historic margins twice. She has to do this, because otherwise there’s a chance we could end up with a second referendum, which would be utterly immoral because you can’t expect to have another vote just because you lost the first one.

All along, characters such as David Davis told us the EU would back down because they need us more than we need them. If we didn’t buy Europe’s nectarines, their entire economy would collapse. Strangely, it hasn’t quite turned out like that; Europe carries on as normal, watching us with fascination, the way BBC4 viewers watch a documentary film about a village in Wiltshire where everyone staples a porcupine to their genitals once a year.

So now we hear people calling the phone-in radio shows and snarling “we got through the Blitz so we can get through this”. And that’s right. It’s not an exact analogy, because we didn’t vote for the Blitz, in a referendum in which we were assured we’d have much more money to spend on the NHS if the Luftwaffe destroyed the four houses opposite, followed by politicians screaming that what 17.4 million people voted for was to set fire to Coventry and spend three years hiding in a hole dug in the garden. But they make a good point.

The latest story they’re outraged about is Esther McVey’s claim that the EU insists all its members “will have to adopt the euro” after 2020, even though, while it still remains a member, that is not the case for the UK. Next week she’ll shout: “From 2023 every man in an EU nation will have to dip his knob for three minutes a week into a beaker of red ants. Then the Daleks are due to join the EU, and they’ll have freedom of movement to undercut wages in the demolition industry by exterminating buildings in 20 minutes, and to keep the Poles happy all words have to have a Z in them, and in 2024 the EU will order all its members to join a new Ice Age according to a report titled ‘Britainz toz bze coveredz in zice zand mammothz’.”

At the moment, every attempt to resolve Brexit involves appeasing these people. But they’re a small minority. This is their big moment on their chosen issue, but they can mobilise no one. There are no big rallies or marches, just a rota of fuming people calling radio phone-ins.

It’s doubtful they represent anyone under the age of 40, though Jacob Rees-Mogg is obviously an exception, because he wrote “dies irae, dies illa” so he’s down with the Latin-speaking section of the youth who are all on street corners saying: “A man say veni vidi vici bruv, Jacob da man, u get me.”

If we had a leader who was prepared to ignore them, we could probably find a compromise. And that would be a disaster, because this is nightly entertainment – and so much more enjoyable than having medicine or food.