The passport farce shows Brexit is really an Ealing comedy

Not everything that happens in life is symbolic of something bigger. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But it’s worth reflecting briefly before the week is over on the diplomatic, economic, political and legal nonsense of what, for a few hours longer, we can still call passportgate. (Has it become a ‘gate’? I do hope so.)

This week’s outrage was provoked by the news that the contract to produce the new, bluey-black, blackish-blue, 50-shades-of-blue passports had been awarded to a Franco-Dutch company called Gemalto, at the expense of the British De La Rue. Some jobs in Gateshead may have been put at risk by this decision, although De La Rue has dozens of international clients and many other contracts to serve. Indeed, up to 70 jobs could be created by Gemalto at its UK sites.

Some Brexiteers immediately howled at what they called a “national humiliation”. Remoaners teased their opponents by mocking this apparent loss of control. Of course, if there hadn’t been a populist lurch towards reinventing the old passport – which we could have done anyway while still being a member of the EU – none of this disruption need ever have taken place. Besides, it was the creation of the European single market, steered through the European Community by a British Conservative, Lord Cockfield, with the support of Mrs Thatcher, which liberalised trade and allowed this sort of international tendering process to take place. Sauce for the free market goose must be sauce for the continental gander.

Passports matter as a bureaucratic device to get across borders. But they do not really symbolise anything more important than that. Of course, you need to hang on to them. No alert InterRailer can ever have felt completely relaxed handing over a passport to the train guard overnight. Wrong ’uns suspected of crimes may be asked to surrender theirs.

False identities, supported by forged passports, are the stuff of crime and espionage in real life and in fiction. Freddie Forsyth’s The Day of The Jackal introduced the innocent to the idea of stealing a dead child’s identity and using the birth certificate to get hold of new documentation. In Sidney Lumet’s film Murder on the Orient Express, one of the many plot twists revolves around a grease mark obscuring a character on the passport belonging to Countess Helena Andrenyi (Jacqueline Bisset). The passport held another clue, which stimulated the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot, and helped him solve the case.

Such are the exotic and fantastic tales made possible by passport jiggery pokery. But how banal and bathetic have been the protestations of infuriated Brexiteers. How feeble their misguided enterprise looks. The flimsiness of their case has been exposed by the excesses and idiocies of their most recent complaints: chucking dead haddock into the Thames, making tasteless and ill-founded allusions to Adolf Hitler, and now flapping about because free trade, which they claim to support, will mean their new blackish/blueish passport will be made by – yes! – foreigners.

For a while, it has been becoming clearer that, during the godforsaken process of Brexit, we have in fact been reliving a less amusing version of the 1949 Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico. For those who don’t know the film, its premise is the discovery that a little corner of London may in fact belong to the Duke of Burgundy. A standoff occurs between the Westminster government and the newly independent Burgundian territory of Pimlico. Postwar ration books are torn up, and the residents rejoice that they have taken back control. The tension is eventually resolved, and the “Burgundians” return to the fold, their brief flirtation with “freedom” over. It has all been a big fuss about nothing.

At the moment no such benign or peaceful outcome for Brexit looks likely. If you want a more realistic picture of the future, imagine Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage shouting through megaphones by the side of the Thames, as they prattle on about Hitler while shovelling more dead fish into the river and waving their French-printed passports, whose still-wet blue-black ink is staining their fingers.

• Stefan Stern is director of the High Pay Centre and co-author of Myths of Management