Sketch: It's time for a referendum on being laughed at by Belgium

“The British sense of humour,” was meant to be the last hope to cling to, when we’re all eating out of bins probably by some point towards the middle of next week

“If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy“ said Abraham Lincoln or Yoda or David Davis or someone like that, and if the British people are ever to change their mind on Brexit, the point at which they are evidently less funny than the Belgians should certainly be that point.

“The British sense of humour,” was meant to be the last hope to cling to, when we’re all eating out of bins probably by some point towards the middle of next week. That and the “British language.”

So when former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, the sort of chap you might ordinarily find hiding in the more eccentric corner of a David Mellor lookalike convention, can stand up in the European Parliament and so easily and so gleefully turn this once great country in to a laughing stock in its own language, something has gone even more wrong than had been previously understood.

We’re making it easy for them, to be fair. To stomp out the EU is one thing. For a British Prime Minister to then, eighteen months later, take new widely popular EU regulations, re-badge them with their own “Conservatives” branding and pump them on to social media as if they were your own doing is quite another. On Saturday, Theresa May proudly claimed on Twitter, “We’re banning credit card charges.” The truth is that the EU is banning credit card charges. What her party is trying to do is make it possible to bring them back.

“I see the confusion is a little bit widespread in Britain at the moment,” Mr Verhofstadt told a fairly empty room in Brussels. “Michael Gove for example has forgotten that the ban on plastic bags is an EU regulation. The Prime Minister, Mrs May, doesn’t know, apparently that the abolition of charges on credit cards is a consequence of a directive of the EU.”

Over in the corner, David Coburn, the Last Kipper in Scotland, wobbled his jowels in intense disapproval. Come to Brussels and take the piss. That was the plan. Having the piss taken out of me? What’s that about?

It was David Davis, by the way, who said those words: “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.”

In his defence, he cannot have known that five years later they would be repeated all around Brussels in hushed reverence. Back then, it was just another lame attack on the automatic transposition of EU directives into national law, not the now go to line for second referendum merchants.

And if a second referendum does happen, here is the question the public should be asked: “Have you had enough of being laughed at by the Belgians?”

I’d be tempted to predict a landslide, but honesltly, who knows anything anymore.