Which terrifying nation do you suppose David Cameron thinks will go to war with us after Brexit? I have some ideas

Petrifying potential foes include Cyprus, Slovenia and the regional superpower of Malta

David Cameron speaking in Peterborough following local election success there (AFP)

Don’t panic, don’t panic! Actually, consider that order countermanded. Do panic, do panic! The drums of war can already be heard drifting across from Normandy, and while it may be a distant echo now, it will rapidly build into a deafening cacophony should we vote to leave the EU on June 23.

The Prime Minister will excuse me précising his remarks about the lethal threat in wait if Brexit wins the day, because with our enemies mustering across the Channel there isn’t a moment to lose. When David Cameron darkly mutters that the UK has regretted “turning its back on Europe” before and that the EU has been instrumental in maintaining peace, and when he rhetorically asks whether leaving is “a worth risk taking”, it feels safe to condense that elongated dog whistle as follows: Vote to leave and we’re dooooomed, I tell ye. Dooooooooooooooomed!

By whom we will be doomed he does not state. But it’s still the earliest of doors; no doubt when he finds the time Cameron will decrypt the message by stating which EU powers could punish us for the impertinence of turning our back on them.

We could, of course, have a fair stab at playing Bletchley Park – although with Iain Duncan Smith, God bless him, there is no need. That simple soul never bothers to encode his observations.

From the other side of this cavernous Tory schism, Duncan Smith is explicit in identifying the enemy as the beastly Hun. From his backbench retirement home, the Private Godfrey of internal Tory Eurowars took a moment from helping his sister Dolly with her upside-down cakes to assert that, two years ago, Germany bullied Cameron into abandoning his wish for an immediate cessation of migration.

Which IDS dislikes the more, the Bosch or this Quisling prime minister, is anyone’s guess. But, with the Brexit camp in apparent disarray, hats off to the erstwhile guardsman for singing the song with such blustering defiance.

Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Cameron

If you think we’re on the run?

IDS is in distress about the bleedin’ Hun

But he comes each evening and he’s ready with his gun

So who do you think you are kidding …

Now it could be that I misread Cameron by decrypting his warning to “keep your friends close but your enemies closer” reference to the Germans. On reflection, the mortal post-Brexit enemy he has in mind is almost certainly Luxembourg. Truth be told, most are shamefully ignorant about that tiny lowland nation. But the one thing we do know is that it is not a country with which you’d wish to pick a fight.

Imagine if Cameron exposed the lunacy of having no fully active aircraft carriers by going to war with the landlocked Grand Duchy. And how would our stockpile of intercontinental nuclear missiles, which could barely cause three separate extinction level events, bear up against 273 sturdy bourges with bayonets and a regimental goat called Radouane?

Other petrifying potential foes include Cyprus, Slovenia and the regional superpower of Malta. And yet one cannot discount that the subliminal message Cameron is really trying to implant is that 70 years is but the blink of an eyelid in the span of human history, and nobody really changes.

If that sounds demented, this is England. And here in England everything is refracted through the prism of the Second World War, from which we emerged as victors and also bankrupt, inheriting a sense of moral superiority and a deep inferiority complex. Who wouldn’t be bamboozled by that paradox? Ever since, we have been stumbling around in search of a post-imperial place in the world order, trying to decide if it’s a European power or the 51st State of the Union. That struggle will survive the referendum.

Speaking of that former colonial possession, a clutch of 13 American grandees (former Secretaries of States, Defence Secretaries, etc) have had their twopenn’orth in a letter to the Times. Amid the obligatory drivel about shared values, loyal friends, blah blah, special relationship, yada yada yada, is a warning not wholly dissimilar to Cameron’s.

If you leave the EU, write Madeleine Albright and the gang, you will imperil not only your security but your global status. “In our globalised environment it is critical to have size and weight to be heard”, reads one portion. Translated, this means: “Don’t for one second think the US will lift a finger to help if you become an (even more) irrelevant little island runt.”

The timing of this, so close on the heels of Cameron’s warning, is uncanny. So uncanny that, noting the spelling of globalised with an ‘s’ rather than a ‘z’, one might wonder whether the letter was in fact composed by an English hand. Possibly in Downing Street?

But time is short, and I must leave you now for the garden spade, because there’s an Anderson bomb shelter to be dug in the back garden.

As this phoney war drags on, the mighty forces of Luxembourg are massing across the Channel. And which of us would trust either the appeaser Cameron or Private IDS Godfrey of the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard to keep us safe from those?