Morrissey fans have for years equated his more unpalatable pronouncements with the babblings of a beloved but out of touch relative. Some of the things Uncle Stephen says seem a bit racist, but he has seen a lot of changes in the area he lives in, he got food poisoning from a bad curry on the Bristol Road in 1978, and he says he couldn’t get on Top of the Pops in the 80s because he wasn’t black.

But are Morrissey fans justified, in the light of Morrissey’s unambiguous support for both the violent tanning salon entrepreneur Tommy Robinson and the far-right For Britain party, in finally losing faith?

Either way, it looks like I picked the wrong year to take an 18-month break from standup and work incognito as a Morrissey impersonator fronting a Smiths and Morrissey covers band. I know it’s over. My Boz Boorer lookalike has been put to work in the garden, trapping jackdaws and building a gazebo.

Until last week I had four Mexican musicians holed up in the spare room, working on a mash up of This Charming Man and a Paul Simon song, entitled Here’s to You Tommy Robinson. “Why ponder the law’s complexities, when Robinson’s done for a breach of the peace?”

My deliberate Morrissey-style weight gain was all for nothing it appears, and now I am just a fat 50-year-old man of whom passersby remark: “Morrissey has let himself go. What with the weight gain and the Tommy Robinson stuff.”

The late Sean Hughes, a fellow standup comedian to whom Morrissey meant a lot, had insisted on being cremated last year to the sound of the Smiths’ Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, and Morrissey’s calculated black comic misery made even Sean’s actual immolation momentarily funny. Sean also had the perfect Morrissey joke: “Everyone grows out of their Morrissey phase. Except Morrissey.”

But Morrissey’s controversial song lyrics should not be taken as evidence of their writer’s true feelings, any more than this column, by the Observer-reading columnist character of Stewart Lee, represents what the real Stewart Lee actually thinks.

Thus, in 1988, when Morrissey told the titular hero of Bengali in Platforms, “Oh shelve your western plans/ And understand/ That life is hard enough when you belong here”, the bewildered immigrant was perhaps merely an ill-judged metaphor for loneliness; in 1992’s The National Front Disco, when Morrissey sang “England for the English!” from the point of view of a disenchanted young man seduced by the far right, we accepted that exploring that point of view was not the same as endorsing it.

Just as, in 1967, when John Lennon sang: “I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob”, we knew John Lennon was not the walrus goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob, goo goo g’joob, goo goo goo g’joob at all. John Lennon was in fact the eggman. The walrus was Paul.

The credibility problem would arise if John Lennon, having said he was a walrus in a song, had then gone around actually being a walrus, and choosing to live as a walrus and do all walrus stuff, like eating benthic bivalve molluscs and engaging in competitive courtship displays. Then we would have had no option but to believe that John Lennon actually was a walrus after all. Which is sort of what Morrissey has done.

This isn’t the time for ambiguity, or irony, or publicity-seeking controversy. Those days are gone, and I miss them, as I am part of a generation that profiteered from the assumption that political correctness was a done deal, and now we could have fun jumping in and out of its boundaries, like street kids round a spurting water main. But the Nazi-saluting pug bloke has just joined Ukip so his racist dog doesn’t seem remotely funny any more.

If Breitbart or Spiked can roll out your comments approvingly online you have fucked up. Nowadays, your true intentions have to be written through every inch of your content, like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock, so at any point the useful idiots of the hipster “alt-right” and their fellow travellers in the opinion industry chose to snap it, it still can’t be repurposed. The trouble is, there’s no longer any way to make the case that Morrissey ever meant anything other than what he says.

But what to do when our idols disappoint us? Like a lot of the centrist dads that constitute his audience, I suddenly found I finally had to decide what to do with my Morrissey records.

I’ve got vintage psychedelic vinyl by actual murderers, and books of poetry by antisemites and paedophiles, who are hard to write out of literary history. And the increasingly reactionary comments made by Mark E Smith in his latter years will not tempt me to part with even the most unnecessary Fall compilation. But somehow, illogically and sentimentally, I held Morrissey to different standards.

As it happened, the break came easily. The last few weeks I’ve been smashing the plastic cases of my CDs, and filing them in folders, to save my children a tedious purge of obsolete physical media when I die.

Oddly, when I got to S (I file Morrissey’s solo stuff alongside the Smiths) I found myself putting Morrissey’s entire works, without really giving it any thought, into the box I was taking to the charity shop. I kept the vinyl of the Smiths’ debut, and the Hatful of Hollow compilation, totemic physical objects that link me to a certain mindscape, but the rest just suddenly seemed irrelevant.

There was no great fanfare. I didn’t ceremonially smash Morrissey’s works or burn them in the street like entartete kunst. It all happened with a whimper, not with a bang, and with sadness for the sorry state of things, not erectile pride in my own virtuousness. Suddenly, I just didn’t want Morrissey in my home any more. And I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which I would ever listen to him again.