Knock knock? Who’s there? Benjamin Netanya. Benjamin Netanya who? That’s right, can I come in and see Theresa May please?

Before you clog up the below-the-line comments for this column with criticisms, I am aware this knock-knock joke doesn’t quite work, logically. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was left standing at the unanswered door of No 10 on Monday, yes, but his name is not Benjamin Netanya. It is Benjamin Netanyahu.

And of course, when asked “Who’s there?”, Benjamin Netanyahu would have given his entire name, not an inexplicably truncated version of it in order to set up an illogical punchline. He’s not going around the globe trying to amuse world leaders into taking action against Iran by entertainingly editing his own name to make a joke work. He’s not that clever.

While Theresa May’s Monday “Doorgate” scandal blew over quickly, if Jeremy Corbyn had left a world leader standing unwelcomed at his door, we would never have heard the end of it from the biased British news media.

An event doesn’t even have to have happened for us to be able to hear already the frivolous tone of dishonest levity Laura Kuenssberg would have deployed to cover it, like a gossipy schoolgirl, breathlessly telling you the bad news in a voice suggesting at once self-righteous horror and salacious excitement.

If smelly Tania Masters had wet her pants in RE, Laura Kuenssberg would ask the other girls if they had heard about it, but would do so in such a way as to suggest that while, of course, the incident was awful for poor Tania, it was also somehow thrilling for everyone else, and if they gave her 10p they could even see the pants, which she had screwed up in her pocket.

The accomplice-cartoonists of Brexit Britain would have fed the Corbyn’s door event into their satanic child-labour-driven comedy mills, the gears grinding, vast slabs of satire-stone crushing the incident down into cartoon pulp.

Look, there’s a scribble of Corbyn now, in the Express or the Mail, peeping out of the curtains of his Islington home, as a hooded dying skeletal figure labelled “The Future of the Parliamentary Labour Party”, its rotting feet tripping each other up in tangled anti-EU bunting, raps at his door, Corbyn hoping that if he pretends not to see the horrible vision, it will just go away.

It’s deadline day. Sitting here in this annually familiar Leicester hotel room, wearing just last night’s stand-up-sweated pants, I tried to imagine a parody of a newspaper cartoon of Corbyn, and instead accidentally conjured an image which sums up my current genuine feelings about the Labour party, in the wake of Wednesday’s Brexit vote.

I went back over the start of the column. I toyed with opening it with a more accurate version of the imagined knock-knock exchange, thus: “Knock knock? Who’s there? Benjamin Netanyahu. Benjamin Netanyahuhu? No, it’s Benjamin Netanyahu, can I come in and see Theresa May please?” But in the end, I didn’t.

On balance, I felt the slightly less realistic “Benjamin Netanya” version of the knock-knock joke, with which I opened the bit, was punchier, despite its structural flaws. And my editor here at the Observer says it is important to grab the reader’s attention, and not get bogged down in long-winded explanations of irrelevant details. She has also suggested that metaphors drawn from the writer’s life that have an unexpected correlation with current affairs are also an acceptable framing device.

Two summers ago, clearing decades of foliage from an abandoned garden, I learned a belated respect for rats. Our cat went for the baby ones as they emerged fighting from long undisturbed nests, but they stood up to him on their hind legs; a quarter of his size, they hissed and spat and screamed and punched at him like prizefighters, before he took them by their necks and tossed them onto the burning bonfire. But most Labour party MPs just lay down before the second Brexit vote and threw themselves, and their party, onto the pyre without a struggle. There are braver rats.

Some of the rats put up a fight, admittedly. Chuka Umunna tabled a motion challenging the Brexiters to stand by the promise of £350m a week for the NHS that their leaders had been happy to literally stand in front of in poster form last summer, and it was rejected. The press crushed Ed Miliband with his tombstone-etched pledges. But abandoned “£350m for the NHS” posters are being used to gift-wrap boxes of empty promises.

MPs also rejected attempts to ensure the status of long-term EU nationals here, whose uprooting would be at least as traumatic as the airport stranding of Muslims that millions worldwide turned on Trump for last week. When even the concept of shame has evaporated, where is there to go? You cannot shame a Brexiter, it appears. Politics was already post-truth. Now it is post-shame as well.

Without truth or shame there is nothing to keep the Brexiters in check, except Tim Farron. Unlike truth or shame, Farron at least has the advantage of being an actual living thing, rather than an abstract concept. This must count for something I suppose, but the huddled masses edged towards Tim by an utter disappointment with Labour’s Brexit performance are running on hope.

Other politicians, in contrast, become abstract ideas. Ken Clarke has taken the form of a hush-puppied jazz banshee, warning of doom in six-eight. And when I look at Nigel Farage, I see only a man who, before masturbating, would put on a pair of driving gloves. And a cap.

Even the exact location of Paul Nuttalls’s current home has become mysterious, as if he travels the country in a Tardis-like workman’s hut powered by hate, targeting its next destination with a steam-punk dashboard gauge that detects the smell of despair; a smell which seems to be overwhelming the whole country.

Meanwhile we learn that our economic saviour Donald Trump will be knocking at our national door in June. What’s the betting his visit will be planned for the Glastonbury weekend, same as the Brexit vote was, taking 250,000 potential protesters, torn between laughing ironically at Lionel Richie and making a difference, off the streets?

Knock knock. Who’s there? Donald Trump. You’d better come in then, no one else comes round to play any more.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is now touring, see stewartlee.co.uk for details