Last week’s newspaper attacks on Jeremy Corbyn have moved from the dishonest into the deranged. On page seven of Monday’s Telegraph, Sir Gerald Howarth MP, who once worried that the same sex marriage bill would be seen by “the aggressive homosexual community… as but a stepping stone to something even further”, analysed Corbyn’s Remembrance service bow.

Sir Gerald, who was dismayed when the ban on military homosexuals was lifted because many “ordinary soldiers in Her Majesty’s forces joined the services precisely because they wished to turn their backs on some of the values of modern society”, explained how Corbyn’s “slight tip forward” toward the Cenotaph “should have gone down to around 45 degrees from the waist” proving that he was “not cut from the cloth of a statesman”.

Perhaps, mindful of Sir Gerald’s anxieties, Corbyn had refrained from bending too far forward in order to avoid encouraging any members of the aggressive homosexual community present at the ceremony to see his action as a stepping stone to something even further.

Meanwhile, on page 23 of the same edition, the Telegraph’s former editor Charles Moore, whose decision to live in Tunbridge Wells indicates a man at peace with posterity, took a contrary position to Sir Gerald. He said that Corbyn behaved with decorum at the Cenotaph, but that this was actually worse than if he had behaved appallingly, as it was an attempt to foist far-left values on the public “by outward deference to common norms”.

Whatever Corbyn does is wrong, it seems. Punching blindly out of the paper bag of his own lunacy, Moore concluded, “It is sensible, from [the Labour party’s] point of view, to make well-arranged poppies part of their window dressing.”

Illustration by David Foldvari.

While I don’t doubt that Corbyn is a Marxist sociopath hellbent on the destruction of British society, and indeed I applaud him for this, the best evidence of well-arranged window-dressing in British politics last week was the Conservatives’ hasty grafting of a digital poppy on to an all-purpose online David Cameron maquette, which can be speedily adapted to sport the appropriately sincere symbols of any passing festival of remembrance.

Father Dom Bernardo Vincelli’s tonic wine was sentimentally drunk by old soldiers years after they had consumed it under fire in Normandy. It is understood that, for next year’s remembrance ceremony, the prime minister’s tear ducts are to be surgically altered so that he can cry French Benedictine on demand, lick it off his own face, and then transubstantiate it in his bladder, to wee out the holy tears of the fallen.

Taking contrary arguments to arrive at the same conclusion, Sir Gerald and Charles Moore are like terrible hack comedians on some shit TV panel show, who’ve found the same funny punch line, and now just need to reverse-engineer opinions to justify it.

The Telegraph even included a helpful photo diagram, showing the exact angle of Corbyn’s bow, with protractor-style annotation to prove that it did, indeed, clock in at below Sir Gerald’s respectful angle of 45 degrees.

What constitutes offence is normally a difficult thing to delineate. The N-word, for example, while unacceptable racist filth in the mouth of your dad, may yet be a delight in the gutter poetry of African American rap singers, like Ice Cube, Ice-T or the Insane Clown Posse.

Defining offence is so complicated. That’s why it was thoughtful of the Telegraph to publish an actual graph of the angle of Corbyn’s bow. The existence of a literal calibration of offence relieves us of the obligation of understanding complicating factors like context, intent, or the agenda of the observer. Corbyn’s bow was undeniably offensive because it fell outside the mathematical parameters of inoffensive bowing.

Oddly, I have previous experience of a protractor being used to calculate offence. Twenty-one years ago I appeared in a TV sketch show, and in an item written by the comedian Richard Herring, Tom Binns featured naked as a showering footballer. When the rushes arrived, there were legal anxieties that Binns’s penis appeared to be erect, and that the footage could not be broadcast.

A BBC ombudsman analysed Binns’s penis with a protractor, using the Mull of Kintyre test, and found that Binns’s penis, while buoyant, was angled downwards at less than the 45 degree mark that would have made it unfit for transmission. Turning from the Telegraph to the Sun, this knowledge was to come back to haunt me.

The Sun’s front page, Leveson a mere memory, maintained Corbyn had not bowed at all, downgrading his movements to a futile nod, and ran a photo of the nodding “pacifist” next to a picture of an apparently topless woman standing heroically in some snow in just tiny pants and ski-boots. Her back was towards the camera, but the subconscious 3D modelling in my mind kicked in involuntarily, and I was very slightly excited, surely the paper’s intention in displaying the image.

Video: Did Jeremy Corbyn bow properly at the Cenotaph? Guardian

Later that day, as I walked home past a decorated war memorial, the stirring began again, and I realised to my horror that accidentally viewing the image of the semi-naked woman on the Sun cover alongside their story on Corbyn and the Cenotaph had caused me to associate subconsciously Remembrance Day with mild sexual arousal.

Appalled at what had happened to me, through no fault of my own I might add, and terrified of incurring the wrath of Sir Gerald for my inappropriate response to the sacred symbols around me, I grabbed my protractor from my satchel and rushed into a toilet cubicle to calibrate the extent of my unintentional disrespect.

Luckily, I realised that, as usual, my penis fell below the required standard to constitute legal tumescence, and quickly mailed off mathematically annotated photographic evidence of this to Sir Gerald, for fear of becoming the subject of a Daily Telegraph exposé myself, while praying that he himself would not interpret this desperate gesture as an invitation to a stepping stone to something even further.

We all remember the dead in our own way, and contextualise their sacrifices as we see fit. I stood among a small crowd at the war memorial at the library where I was working at 11 o’clock on Wednesday. Someone’s phone went off, of course. Young mums walked past unaware of the significance of the moment. I thought about my grandfather, an RAF crewman, quietly and privately traumatised, I think, by flying over Dresden, days after the firebombing. Though he continued to profess hatred of all foreigners until his death, as was the way of his generation, I suspect that, from that day onwards, his heart wasn’t really in it.

A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 until 8 Jan; stewartlee.co.uk. Stewart Lee is the curator of next year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, at Prestatyn Pontins, 15-17 April 2016