Since this Brexit business I’ve been following the news as never before; time and again my jaw drops and my lips part, but no laughter comes out. Satire was already dead, so what’s new? I can’t work it out. Was it reborn and did it die again? Politicians have always got away with bollocks – but perhaps not this quantity of bollocks, perhaps not so day after day after day.

Parliament has just decided on two major issues, about which I was encouraged to write letters to my MP, and did. But although she found the time and energy to diss the party leader and resign from her position in the shadow cabinet at a time when the country needed ‘a strong opposition’, my MP isn’t in the voting vein. No it’s not her fault that she can’t fully participate in the legislature – she’s having cancer treatment, but, bloody hell, it isn’t fair is it? If an MP is ill, why is there no system for counting in her vote? A stroke of personal rotten luck has disenfranchised an entire constituency. Not only is my own vote completely useless, and always has been, in fact I might as well wipe my arse on it, but my MP’s vote is useless! How powerless can you get? I carry on voting, I carry on signing petitions, and carry on carrying placards, knowing that the biggest demonstration in world history made not a shred of difference.

So Trident goes on. Proportional representation remains a dream. Corbyn is vilified for not being well enough dressed, for comparing Islamophobia to anti-semitism, for thinking that nuclear weapons are dangerous. May is welcomed in as a safe option – a woman who said without hesitation that she was prepared to annihilate 100,000 innocent men, women and children. Well, she’s used to thinking of people in terms of figures and doesn’t seem to have much of a handle on humanity. How could you find a worse wally for a foreign secretary? He calls black people piccaninnies! Hang on, I’ll write that again. Our foreign secretary calls black people piccaninnies! Never mind that his only experience of negotiating with Germans came off with three never to be used second hand water cannon, never mind about his naked dishonesty and sedition during the Brexit campaign, never mind that he was a Bullingdon boy – the club whose members trash restaurants or, say, set fire to paper cash in front of a homeless person for a joke. Who knows, Johnson might also have put his johnson into a dead pig’s gob. At least we can be sure Theresa May hasn’t done that. No, no, she’s a Christian, like Blair. Oh, what the hell, Blair, May, Johnson, they’re all very well dressed, that’s the main thing.

In what way has Blair been held to account for Iraq? He hasn’t even apologised. He would do it again, he says. He says it in public, without a blush. Even after the Chilcot Enquiry. He’s a lawyer and he thinks the Iraq war wasn’t illegal, so maybe it wasn’t, but it doesn’t take a GCSE in Law to fill in the blanks between the United Nations Charter: war is only legitimate in self-defence and as a last resort; and the Chilcot enquiry: Saddam Hussein was not a military threat, war was not a last resort, Blair promised Bush ‘I’m with you whatever’. Whatever. These things are written in black and white and freely available to anyone who can read. But it takes years of study and experience and letters like QC and LLD after one’s name to be able to argue that black is white, and if black is white, then all those words just vanish.

So Blair is still free. Still sleeps at night, presumably, the ex peace envoy and philanthropist. Still draws a government pension of 70k. Still earns an obscene fortune doing obscene deals for human rights abusers and banks. Still owns millions of quids’ worth of property in this outward looking modern democratic country where a few years ago an eighteen-year-old girl was sentenced to ten months in prison for moving two left-footed trainers from inside a looted shop to outside the looted shop. If they’d been a pair of leopard skin kitten heels, maybe she’d have got off. I know it’s not Botany bay for stealing a loaf of bread, but it’s not ‘going forward’. Imagine. Ten months in prison. Awful. She didn’t even take them home.

So now we have a new Prime Minister, and phew, it wasn’t Andrea Leadsome because she did a decent thing, just as Cameron did a decent thing, abandoning the mess he created. For a moment, there, I thought May might be an improvement. She started off as though she’d signed up to the wrong side – it was all about the burning injustice done to ordinary, working-class, poor, black, female and otherwise disadvantaged people, injustice perpetrated by the government she’s just served in for six years as home secretary. (Who is ordinary anyway?) She clearly doesn’t care two hoots for the truth. Will we hold her to account when she fails to deliver any salve for her own government’s injustice? We don’t usually do we?

What has the Conservative Party done for women? she asked. ‘It keeps making us Prime Minister’! No, Theresa, it didn’t make me Prime Minister did it? It made you Prime Minister. You. And that other one. That’s the royal ‘us’ you’re using there. Spot the difference.

Am I alone in finding her first performance at Prime Minister’s question time utterly cringeworthy? She tried to be funny. I suppose Tories can unite behind any old leader, because they have no principles to compromise. As long as the leader wears nice shoes and the subsidised House of Commons claret is up to par. It’s easy, just as it’s easy to take responsibility when you don’t give a shit about other people, and those so-called tough decisions simply aren’t tough if they don’t affect you in any way whatsoever – financially, emotionally, morally.

Mrs May, she sounds like a Happy Families card. She is the captain, and the ship is sinking, and I want to jump out. It’s one way of dealing with net immigration – make this country such a crappy place to live in that anyone who can will fuck off.

So that’s a summary of the last few weeks in old Blighty. But then, life up close went on as usual, making one wonder if these elected ones actually do anything at all. Perhaps it’s just a sideshow, and the real damage is done by the civil service anyway.

Oh no, I’ve just listened to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership campaign launch. He says that Labour’s opposition efforts took the edge of the chancellor’s deepest cuts. I can’t help believing him, probably because he’s honest. He’s certainly one of few exceptions to the rule that only power-greedy ambitious narcissistic manipulators become powerful. I can’t vote for him, because I’m in the Green party, and even if I’d joined the Labour party instead, I’m too poor to spare the £25 bunged on by their executive committee in effort to nobble him – yet another jaw-dropping insult to democracy in these jaw-dropping times. But I hope he wins. I don’t care what the papers say.

What the papers say is half the problem. It injures one’s health to be connected to all this political nonsense and terrible news, especially if one’s sense of humour is comatose. The most important event didn’t really need to be reported – it was literal hot air: Tuesday 19th July was the hottest July day on record, and probably won’t stay the hottest for long. Westminster fiddles while the earth is burning.

I think I’m either going to detach completely, or look for the good news, or at least try and focus on things I can change. ‘Be the change’ as Gandhi might have said. Small acts of kindness. Sorting out the recycling. Boiling one cup of water if I’m only having one cup of tea. And yes, I’ll carry on voting, writing letters, signing petitions, waving placards and handing out leaflets, because the alternative to Project Hope is despair, and there’s simply no point in that.

For example, what about this: non-violent struggle – an inspiring TED talk by a good strong brave woman. Or – possibly even more important – an irrelevant laugh, like this.