Rees-Mogg to the DUP, Hoey to Ukip … we need a politicians’ hostage swap

“Deselection” is a dirty word in parliamentary politics, a signal of vindictive disunity. The Tories would never think of it and would prefer, if they’re to go down, to take the country with them. Labour talk about it but only in the sense of accusing each other of secretly wanting it. Personally, I’m agnostic. I can think of no good reason why representing your party should be a job for life, wherein only by voting against the party can your constituents remove you. They’re politicians, not mini-popes. Yet I can also see that the job of both governing and opposing should be considered pretty much full-time, and a party mired in savage infighting and interminable legal challenge might not be an outward-looking political force.

Choosing a new candidate is like having a baby: there’s never a good time, but some times are a lot worse than others. So I’m going to suggest an alternative.

The new political mood has unmasked the misfits of parliament, the MPs who are plainly in the wrong party. They’re in the Chelsea stand, cheering for Stoke; they’ve turned up to a vicars-and-tarts party dressed as a rabbit; they joined a British Military Fitness class forgetting that they hate authority. There are many variants of outsider, from the exuberant maverick (it was a perfectly serviceable word until Boris Johnson started using it), to the querulous Norma Desmonds (“I am big, it’s the pictures that got small”) to the shamefaced fish-out-of-water, and they would all be happier in different parties.

With the current delicate seat balance, the fairest outcome would be to swap them over and leave all parties with the same number of seats; however, I tried that with some Post-it notes and a marker and it was like doing a cabinet reshuffle, except with all wild cards and no bankers. It was like being Theresa May. I did not enjoy that at all. There will be some losers in this hostage swap, but it will be worth it for the quiddity of the individuals involved.

Tim Farron and Jacob Rees-Mogg are both undone by the demands of their faith. There is something fascinating about what Christianity does to the political self, the way it forces the private into an unwinnable confrontation with the public. Nobody cares if Tim Farron abhors homosexuality, so long as that only extends to not being homosexual himself; likewise, it would be fine if Rees-Mogg limited his anti-abortion stance to a very small circle comprising himself and his wife. It’s only when their faith intersects with anyone else that there’s a problem – but problem, sadly, there is: you cannot traduce other people’s sexuality from within the Liberal Democrat party. It’s simply not liberal or democratic enough. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are in a bind: you can’t demonise large families with a punitive benefits system and oppose reproductive autonomy at the same time.

It would be much easier to give both these MPs to the DUP, whose manifesto is already like the Old Testament with extra recycling provision. Possibly they could have Rees-Mogg in lieu of a billion quid and then we’d all be happy.

Tory remainers are like a resistance movement in the phase before the thing they’re resisting has gone full metal jacket and forced them underground. Ken Clarke, Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve, Sarah Wollaston – they’re all vocal and frank, and some days they can smell on the air that the mood is with them. But they can’t help noticing the newspaper front pages featuring their faces in crosshairs, and the way their colleagues shuffle off to look at the low-fat yoghurt when they accidentally fetch up alongside them in the sandwich queue. They need to get out before they get got. Logically, they would join the Lib Dems, but realistically, they’d join the Labour party, not for its leader but for the remain like-minds.

This would give Labour a headache, since Brexit has become a proxy for who’s on the left and who’s the right of the party, pushing the left into a harder Brexit stance than they would necessarily choose, just to put clear water between themselves and Chuka Umunna. An influx of remain Tories is hardly going to help. But on the upside, they will be able to rid themselves of the pestilent Kate Hoey, whose stance on everything is more consistently and coherently Ukip than anybody in Ukip. She wouldn’t have a seat, but she would get to be leader. So there’s that.

They’re a peculiar breed, MPs: they want to be treated like regular human beings when they have affairs or are on Twitter, yet they obsess about the prevalence of the “swing voter” while refusing to swing themselves. Nobody needs to be politically homeless, they just need to be prepared to move.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist