This farcical Brexit lunacy is like the politics of the 1970s rewritten for extra comedy value

Manuel’s at the top of the ladder, Polly’s dropped the drinks tray, Basil is thrashing his Austin Countryman just like the Tories are thrashing themselves, and the Major’s screaming ‘Europeans - bad eggs the lot of ’em!’

As the stress peaks, it helps to understand all this as comedy (BBC)

What’s happening? A surge of right-wing populism, a disaffected party in turmoil, bodies piling up and riots in the streets… all a bit 1970s isn’t it?

OK so I invented the riots  –  though post-Brexit we could see a run on Parma ham and papayas in Waitrose. And body parts rather than actual bodies are piling up, as if that wasn’t bad enough.

You remember the 1970s, don’t you? You know, that political no man’s land in between post-war prosperity and Thatcher. A time  –  according to Andy Beckett, author of When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies  –  when politics was “rawer and more honest” and “conflicts between interests and ideologies were out in the open”.

Because it seems 1979’s Winter of Discontent haunts our politics and our thoughts; old ghosts of division and decline colour the air as we lurch from event to crisis, and the Tory psychodrama enters its final, gruesome season.

Last week shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth called the body parts pile-up a “horrific scandal”. But it’s not horrific. Really, nothing could be more normal for this government. Build a monster. Let it rip. Watch it smash things. All key tenets of their Frankenstein politics: the creeping privatisation of the NHS, the constant education missteps, and universal credit — all things that would send Mary Wollstonecraft spinning in her grave.

As for the Ireland issue, we can imagine how this will go: In the middle of the Irish Sea there’s an island, and somewhere on that island a small house. Peek through the window of that small house and you’ll see a group of elves checking every good, every package with their tiny elfin fingers. Not only that. Anything they don’t like the look of is buried under Red Tape Mountain, a giant hill made of EU paperwork. Perhaps this is one of the “fantasy islands” so loved by Brexiteers, as described by former UK ambassador to the EU Ivan Rogers.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon warned Theresa May: If it’s your way, we hit the highway, announcing a new campaign for a Scottish backstop, as if the Irish one weren’t trouble enough.

The DUP  –  who think the Good Friday Agreement is a broken toaster you can have a wee poke around in  –  threatened to withdraw their support. And Dominic Raab laid his cards out on a rapidly spinning table, ruling out a “blind Brexit” but not a Brexit of the blind – before being rushed to Brussels to be told no pasarán! by Michel Barnier and his choir of EU technocrats. Foiled again.

On Monday, Theresa May spoke of “inaccurate speculation” concerning the ongoing talks, forgetting it was inaccurate speculation of a post-Brexit utopia that got us here in the first place. Yesterday, president of the European council Donald Tusk asked the UK government to come up with “concrete proposals”, that is, something other than the scotch mist produced up to now. And while the nation counts down the final hours to a collective ulcer, the question is surely: can a deal be done – or is the hardest of Brexits a done deal?

As the stress peaks, it helps to understand all this as comedy. Manuel’s at the top of the ladder, Polly’s dropped the drinks tray, Basil is thrashing his Austin Countryman just like the Tories are thrashing themselves, and the Major’s screaming “Europeans – bad eggs the lot of ’em!” It’s Fawlty Towers on manic fast-forward, chaos upon chaos, but now an unstoppable tragedy rather than farce.

It feels like the 1970s because the 1970s never went away –  the “economic problems of 1979 were buried, not resolved” according to economics lecturer Alan Shipman. The UK’s current account deficit is widening, productivity is 20 to 30 per cent lower that of our EU competitors, and private sector investment is weak despite large public subsidies.

Yet there’s one important difference: this time, the only body in the street will be the corpse of this genuinely inept government. Because to paraphrase one slogan from the 1970s: Brexit isn’t working, and nor is much else.