Britain’s comics can’t stand Brexit – but the joke is on them

One of the best things about Brexit has been its shattering of anti-establishment pretensions. All the people who for yonks had been getting away with posing as rebels and disruptors and irritants to the status quo have been exposed as utterly allergic to radical political change; as small-c conservatives freaked out by revolt; as the nervous, nodding footsoldiers of political power.

From the trustafarians of Momentum, those laptop Leninists who fantasised that they were revolutionaries, to columnists like Caitlin Moran, the Times’ token rebel who once said she lives ‘like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash’ (cringe much?), virtually every self-styled couterculturalist has gawped in unfiltered horror as a swarm of people, the 17.4m, has done something genuinely revolting. As they said for real, rather than just in a tweet or on a placard that will be binned before dinner, ‘We reject the political order’.