‘You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs’ remarks Sir Ambrose Abercrombie in The Loved One, ‘except in England, of course’.

Published in 1948, The Loved One is a satirical skewering of British manners and the American film industry, which seems projected from a familiar plane of the British psyche; despairing, embarrassed and freighted with delusions of its own grandeur, the post-war Brit reacts to his new predicament by mythologising former glories, and harking back to a rapidly departing past with an uneasy admixture of ironic nostalgia and barking self-pity. Some diseases of the soul are terminal. Others linger. Looking out on to an England still in fear of Tomorrow, looking back always to an ever-appreciating stock of Yesterdays, it’s hard not to look at the current government and infer that Abercrombie’s diagnosis belongs to the second class of things.

It’s clear now that the government’s Brexit strategy is not Shakespearean in tragedy, nor Greek, but a mottled rehashing of the careless over-reach depicted in Waugh’s less subtle works. Not of course, that this is a particularly novel assessment. His satires of England’s ruling class – and we will here omit those other nations which might remain within the Union at your time of reading – have informed several generations of writers, political figures, and members of those same social orders to whom he was so narratively attracted. Michael Gove is such a fan that in 2015, he included Waugh in a list of four writers (the others being Orwell, Eliot and Austen) which, in a hopeful move, he urged civil servants emulate when writing departmental correspondence. Speaking in Australia in 2017, Boris Johnson claimed one of the reasons for Brexit was that Britain wanted to ‘as Evelyn Waugh might have said, protect its might’ a phrasing that even the Evelyn Waugh Society finds hard to pin down to a specific quote from the author. Last January, a letter in the Financial Times cited a passage in Waugh’s 1928 debut Decline And Fall, as an adroit metaphor for the nation’s current state. Quoting Mr Prendergast, a sadsack teacher who feels forced to continue wearing a wig, long after his students detect it as a ludicrous fake, the passage reads:

‘I knew from the start that it was a mistake but once they had seen it, it was too late to go back. They make all sorts of jokes about it.’

‘Brexit is our wig’ came the droll assessment of its submitter, Mr Geoff Scargill. ‘After months of talks and posturing about independence we can see that we are thin on top. Everyone abroad knows it and is making jokes about us. But it is too late to go back’.

There’s a neatness to this assessment that’s attractive. The urge to look upon the modern Conservative movement as Waugh might have done, to view them as mortified, gormless buffoons, is strong; so strong in fact I will not here resist it. There is a staggering incompetence on display, at every level of cabinet, and the wider party, and the European Research Group in particular, that bizarre parasitic organism within its withered parliamentary host. Some clichés are well-worn for a reason. The injunction that states you should resist attributing to malice that which might be sufficiently explained by stupidity is one such canard. When we see prominent ministers misunderstanding not just the mechanics of trade, and the finer points of EU regulations, but what trade deals are and why they exist, it’s not particularly credible to read them as the scent away from more evil manoeuvrings. It’s a similar story when the Tory commentariat spend their skiing holidays referring, en masse, to frictionless borders in Switzerland, Norway or France – all treatied, regulated and trade-dealed within an inch of their span – as good bellwethers for the success of a hypothetical No-Deal border with Ireland, since WTO rules will deprive the latter of even the lubrication necessary to allow grazing cattle to pass without sight of rifle scope.

But there is also something seductive about lampooning the farce of Brexit on its most visible plane. Who hasn’t looked at Theresa May and detected someone who has surely never tickled a baby without filling out the requisite forms? Who has caught sight of Michael Gove’s puckered maw and not discerned some kinship with a grim salaryman sex doll, retrieved from a van fire? Who can resist judging Boris Johnson on the surface-level affect he has so dutifully contrived for our delectation; the thistle-thatched lexicant, fumbling his way through a rumble-tumble chain of greasy prevarications. This practice, what might be termed the Have I Got News For You-ification of political discourse, is a balm in troubled times but, like Prendergast’s Wig, it misses the point of the thing.

‘I expect they’d laugh at something else if it wasn’t that’