Brexit has been a load of nonsense so far – and it’s about to get a whole lot worse

Whatever else can be said of Brexit, I thank it for this. After decades of regret about never having taken acid, it gives some sort of insight into the hallucinogenic experience.

Every day, newspaper taxis appear on the screen bearing stories that seem to stem from altered perception. Today alone they have delivered the following:

– Penny Mordaunt, now international development secretary but then armed forces minister, went to Somalia a couple of years ago packing a piece. She arrived in Mogadishu on government business, by her own overheard account, with a loaded Glock pistol.

– A YouGov poll has discovered that 11 per cent of the public agree with the proposition “politics is working well”. Who are they, these one in nine of the populace, and why are they at liberty?

– The latest Tory to quit a government post (the crucial one, of PPS to pipsqueak defence secretary Gavin Williamson) is named as Will Quince. If Will Quince exists at all, which you have to doubt, it’s as a very minor character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

– Most bananas, in this sabbath instalment of A Midwinter’s Endless Nightmare, is the splash headline “May to ‘handbag’ Brussels in frantic bid to save deal”.

A handbag? To quote Lady Bracknell from Wilde’s first draft, before the Lord Chamberlain put his blue pencil through the line, “What f****** handbag?”

To have a handbag in this Thatcherian context, you need leverage. If the PM thinks she has enough to force the EU27 into more than the most risibly cosmetic of concessions, she’s playing Jasper Carrott nutter on the bus. The one asking after the whereabouts of his camel.

Then again, she’s probably one of the 11 per cent who believes that politics is working well when, by any conventional metric, it isn’t working at all.

Presumably it will revive one day in some form. For now, the oxymoron “chaotic stasis” rules the roost as the headless chickens charge around the labyrinth in search of an exit.

Will Theresa May cluck-cluck-cluck herself out of Tuesday’s vote, and nip to Belgium on Thursday for another ritual punishment beating? If so, will she return claiming victory because a colon has been changed to a semi-colon (if she survives this bowel-melting horror story with any fraction of a colon, she’ll have her own special edition of The Lancet), or they’ve agreed to let the fishing fleet catch one extra whitebait per annum?

If not – if she ploughs ahead with the kamikaze vote and goes down by 50, 70, or three figures – will the zombie PM recognise the rejection of her entire domestic and foreign policy combined as the silver bullet that ends her?

And in that event, what then? Weeks of a brutal leadership election featuring a field resembling the Grand National in quantity, and a pantomime horse gymkhana in quality?

And when one of them limps backwards over the line – be it Jeremy Hunt or Sajid Javid or Dominic Raab or Michael Gove or Grandpa David Davis or Amber Rudd or (the Lord have mercy) Boris Johnson or dear old Will Quince on day release from The Globe, or the late Rod Hull, or Emu, or Pistol Packing Penny, or professional Donald Sinden impersonator Geoffrey Cox, or whoever…what then?

What authority would a new Tory PM have over a House of Commons that can agree about nothing other than its entrenched inability to agree about anything?

In this multi-dimensional chess game between factions confused by the rules of Kerplunk!, every move is worse than the others.

It has the vague flavour of one of those temporal paradoxes that cropped up on Doctor Who when it was good. “Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey,” David Tennant’s Timelord would say, in lieu of “don’t strain your weeny human brains sweating Timelord stuff”, and move on.

But there’s no foreseeable moving on from this. A general election resolves nothing, because there’s no such thing as a single issue general election. Even if a majority government emerged, it wouldn’t have a mandate for any Brexit or non-Brexit even if it could get one past the Commons.

A second referendum is much the least grotesque and most credible option. But can you imagine this parliament settling on the number of questions and their wording? And if Remain squeaked home, as it probably would assuming Jeremy Corbyn rediscovered his passion for obeying the will of Labour members, we’d have four minutes of relief before Nigel Farage launched PUKE-IP – Pretend UK but really English Independence Party – and the civil war kicked off in earnest.

Norway plus, Canada superplus, Vanuatu triple superduper hyperplus, Mordaunt corralling the EU27 into a phone box at the business end of her gun and asking them if they feel lucky, Quince getting his sprite pal Puck to cast a spell to transform continental Europe into a garden gnome…everything feels as viable as everything else.

Somewhere on the other side of this must be a radical realignment. With colossal respect to the 11 per cent, when a political system disintegrates so absolutely – when the Commons executes a coup d’état by way of a single amendment, but has the power to do nothing but frustrate an anarchic/absentee government – the vacuum has to be filled by something better.

Something on paper and in ink, preferably, in the form of one of those wacky written constitutions every sovereign nation on the planet other than two has seen fit to create.

When and how we get to there from here is as much a matter of blind guesswork as when and by what means history’s longest acid trip will end.

For now, buckle up in preparation for a week of unprecedentedly feverish mayhem that will end, as it will begin, in a haze of weary mystification.

Fasten your seatbelts, we’re in for a bumpy night, as Bette Davis said in All About Eve.

Fasten them as tight as your sternums will bear, good subjects of Her Britannic Majesty, because in All About Leave, Or Half Leave, Or Stay, Or Something, it looks like it’ll be a bumpy eternity.