Every single day, Brexit finds a brand new way to disappoint me. Throughout this whole mess – the bus lies, the paralysed government, the lack of any meaningful opposition – I’ve managed to keep my spirits up by remembering that, at the end of it all, at least Britain would definitely be plunged into a Mad Max-style dystopia.

And that was really something to cling to, because a Mad Max-style dystopia would be the best sort of dystopia. It would be nice and warm, the cars would be cool, access to flamethrowers would be more decentralised and, at least on the basis of the last film, you’d barely be able to move for supermodels. Brexit might be unavoidable, but I’d managed to convince myself that – at the very least – the uptick in Tina Turner power ballads would make it slightly bearable. And now even that has been yanked away from us.

David Davis, the Brexit secretary, has now taken the Mad Max-style dystopia off the table. Perhaps it was too fun. Perhaps all the face paint and Doof Warriors meant it wasn’t austere enough to fit the modern Conservative brand. Whatever the reason, we aren’t getting it. Don’t get me wrong, Britain will still become a dystopia once Brexit kicks in – because of course it will – but now we have to choose which of the lesser dystopias it will be. In no particular order, here are my favoured back-up dystopias.

A Children of Men-style dystopia

In all honesty, this is inevitable. Britain will be turned into a military-industrial siege state ruled by a disenfranchised older population, where everyone has stopped giving birth. Admittedly, our dystopia will branch off from the source material a little – the lack of new babies will partly be due to an entire generation being unable to afford to leave their parents’ houses, and partly because nothing kills a boner like having Boris Johnson for prime minister – but the effect will broadly be the same.

A Terminator-style dystopia

Thankfully, we have little to fear from this. Yes, it’s still feasible that a super-intelligent robot race will develop the capacity to enslave humanity, but at least resources will be so scarce post-Brexit that any robots are likely to just be an Amstrad E-m@iler phone Sellotaped to the back of a Furby. You’d probably be able to take them out with the back of a shovel if push came to shove.

A Soylent Green-style dystopia

Your common or garden dystopian set-up – overpopulation, environmental collapse, government-sanctioned assisted suicide clinics – brightened up by a healthy dose of cannibalism. This would be less of a surprise, given that a company called Soylent already exists to sell complete nutritional supplements to people too busy to chew, but that fact alone probably justifies squishing humanity into goo and selling it to Charlton Heston for sustenance.

A La Jeteé-style dystopia

Too foreign. Yuck.

A Never Let Me Go-style dystopia

Forget all the stuff about clones being bred for organ donation and the horror of only existing to be destroyed. Never Let Me Go is basically the story of the painfully repressed British upper classes, their total inability to forge meaningful emotional connections and their absurd fixation on a terrible past that they have somehow managed to retrospectively transform into an idyllic golden age. This one is particularly unlikely to happen after Brexit since it’s pretty much happening now.

• Stuart Heritage is a Guardian columnist