Imagine if politicians took Lent seriously (giving up crisps doesn’t count)

It’s here, guys! The best day of the year. Put on your Noddy Holder wig, stick your head out the window and scream it: it’s Leeennnnnnnt! Today marks the first day of Lent, a time I’ve always had a soft spot for. I think it’s the fact that there are so many excellently named days in it: Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday sound like rejected characters from the Addams Family, maybe their British cousins who have never seen the sun.

Lent is a time of sacrifice, sobriety and telling people how much better you are than them because you’ve managed to avoid eating Skips for just over a month. But what if it were more than that. What if, in these dark and uncertain times, this drab, depressing period, which sounds less like a word and more like a grunt people make when they realise it’s still winter, could provide the answer? What if the solution to all of our political strife … was Lent?

On the face of it, getting politicians to interact with Lent sounds like a terrible idea, mostly because politicians interacting with anything sounds like a terrible idea. Jeremy Corbyn would give up jam for Lent, and then there’d be a massive 39-page scandal in the Daily Mail where one of its investigative reporters rifled through his bin to find an empty jar of marmalade. Corbyn would be branded a “lefty Lent traitor” by the Sun, the entire shadow cabinet would resign, Theresa May would make some kind of tedious joke involving jam at PMQs (“How is he supposed to handle a jam like Brexit if he can’t handle a jam like … jam?”), and the entire front bench would wet themselves laughing and tweet out the video with crying-face emojis because we are run by a country of awful 12-year-olds.

For his part, Corbyn would claim that marmalade was a preserve, not a jam, and would get Ken Livingstone to go on Daily Politics to say that the empty jar was planted there by Zionist conspirators. Pretty soon everyone would tire themselves out and move on to whatever the next pointless distraction was (probably something to do with why Cadbury’s Easter eggs aren’t called “Jesus Christ Our Lord and Saviour Orbs”).

And admittedly, Lent in modern society is a bit of a mess. It used to be a solemn act of fasting over 40 days, and now it’s deciding to give up a specific type of crisps for a bit. I’m not religious, but there is something alluring about wallowing in your own self-sacrifice – who among us hasn’t, when we consciously decide not to eat a biscuit during Lent, thought to ourselves, “This is what it must be like to train for the Olympics”?

But that performative aspect of selected self-sacrifice isn’t really what Lent is about. It’s a unique event in the Christian calendar in the sense that it’s very hard to commercialise – maybe apart from Ascension Day, although I reckon we’re about three years off that being sponsored by Stannah Stairlifts. Lent is the opposite of indulgence, which is commercialism’s stock in trade. If the motto of Christmas is: “Go on, have another three bowls of prawn cocktail, it’s Christmas!” the motto of Lent is: “What the hell do you think you’re doing eating sugar, it’s Lent for God’s sake.” That’s part of the appeal of it – you don’t get supermarkets doing massive Lent blowout sales, or fancy dress shops offering deals on “sexy Lent costumes” (which would just be someone in tight-fitting clothing judging you for eating a bar of chocolate). At its core, Lent is austere, mean and hypercritical, sneering at fun and happiness in favour of self-loathing and guilt. It’s 40 days where everyone has to act like Ann Widdecombe.

And yet inside that kernel of misery and asceticism, it feels like there’s a greater point to it all: not just sacrifice, but also self-reflection. I’ve never wandered a desert for 40 days, but I have got stuck in an Ikea for three hours, and after a while I did start to think about my life and decisions: “How did I get here?”; “What do I value in life?”; “I just wanted some cushions and some meatballs”; “Is there a God?” That, to me, feels like the more important message of Lent: once all of the other distractions fall away, what is truly important in your life? And how much are you willing to sacrifice for what you believe?

That’s a set of questions we haven’t asked for a while in British politics. Right now, it’s all performative – a byproduct of a government paralysed by negotiations it cannot win and an opposition trapped between positions it cannot hold. Nothing can happen in the meantime, so they argue over nothing, simulating outrage and putting forward empty gestures to distract and deflect. Imagine if they gave that up for Lent. Imagine 40 days of quiet, sincere reflection on exactly what they want and why they all got into politics. Imagine if they actually came back with a plan of action and not a new set of insults, lies and fantasy.

It won’t happen, of course – the angry, amnesiac world of politics will carry on regardless. But part of me hopes that someone in government cuts through these distractions and remembers what really matters here. And when they do, I’ll be waiting, Noddy Holder wig and all.

• Jack Bernhardt is a comedy writer and occasional performer