Long after their relationship ended, one of David Cameron’s ex-girlfriends joined a nunnery, so wounded was she by their parting. It is hard to know what religious comforts the supposed pig at the centre of the Daily Mail’s current allegations might later have pursued following Cameron’s brief and perfunctory dalliance with it, primarily because it was already dead. And so on. And so on.

As a professional humorist, there is very little point, this week, in trying to write zingy one-liners about David Cameron, the Bodil Joensen of international politics. (Don’t Google this. Not safe for work.) Within two hours of the rumour breaking, the infinite number of monkeys of Twitter had written all the best jokes, winning the battle of wits by sheer weight of numbers. Well done. I concede defeat.

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But the gravitational pull of unseen interests directing the movement of our perceptions of the pig rumour is all too obvious. It appears we must now view British politics, and the coverage thereof, as its own reality; a vast interrelated fiction comprising many parallel narratives, with our understanding of it shaped by some guiding editorial intelligence; like the Marvel Comics Universe, the Eternia realm common to both He-Man and She-Ra Princess of Power, or the overlapping fantasy worlds of Dallas and Knots Landing.

The dubious pig story first appeared in a book by a wronged political ally of Cameron’s, written in a spirit of spite and self-justification – though, we have to concede, is there really any other kind of book?

Nonetheless, it has been childishly amusing to watch the same trolls usually contracted to crow over the corpses of their defeated enemies struggling to defend their traduced leader. Was I dreaming or did the thinker Toby Young opine on television that the prime minister had “emerged well from the situation”? Perhaps. But he will never be able to eat breakfast in a hotel restaurant again. Or cuddle a pig in public.

Meanwhile, on social media, the expat plant-loather Louise Mensch cited an obscure 1981 street punk B-side, tweeting “the story is rubbish, and if it isn’t, to quote the Anti-Nowhere League, ‘So f****** what?’”

But the League’s So What (“I’ve fucked a sheep, I’ve fucked a goat, I’ve had my cock right down its throat”) is perhaps not the ideal platform upon which to mount a defence of David Cameron, going on, as it does, to justify sexual relations with a schoolgirl in the same nihilistic spirit of mock moral relativism.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

Derived from an overheard pub conversation between some jaded reprobates, So What is not intended to be embraced as a coherent philosophy for life, though the cover version metalhead Mensch presumably knows, that of her rock manager’s husband Peter Mensch’s protegees Metallica, is predictably stadium-shorn of whatever wafer-thin smattering of ironic nuance the original had.

Never mind. All Conservatives’ interactions with culture of any form, from the very idea of public broadcasting itself down to a punk rock B-side, end in confusion. They are like dogs listening to human conversations, the puzzled twitching of their heads sometimes mistaken for understanding.

One might be tempted to assume the pig tale is true because it is difficult to imagine most of the six Conservative MPs suspected of supplying it having enough imagination to imagine it. Jeremy Hunt, for example, couldn’t imagine his way out of an imaginary paper bag even if the bag had a hole cut in it in the exact shape of his own body, with arrows all round it and a flashing exit sign.

Michael Gove, on the other hand, does have a creative streak, and he and I both appear in the same 1983 anthology of verse by adopted middle-class teenagers, Pathetic Bleats From The Cradle Of Privilege.

Gove is also a fan of the down-market horror scribe Dennis Wheatley, and though this looks classy next to the culture secretary John Whittingdale’s voracious appetite for watching women die slowly in “torture porn” horror films, Wheatley’s sacrificial Satanic rites are rarely as lurid as Cameron’s supposed sow abuse.

The way is clear for whoever is really writing the story – Lord Ashcroft, Paul Dacre, or John Major, playing a long game

As an Oxford-educated classicist, Boris Johnson would, however, be familiar with the source material and critical studies required to conjure the bacchanalian vision engulfing the prime minister – Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and any number of visceral Greek and Roman tragedies. But what would be his motive?

I was never one for conspiracy theories, but today the sort of mushroom gibberish I loftily dismissed when it was spewed at me by an articulate crusty nicknamed “The Professor”, hanging out the back of a converted peace convoy ambulance at the Elephant Fayre festival in 1983, suddenly seems plausible.

Unnamed forces have moved against Cameron, as they inevitably would, eventually. The secret chiefs no longer have any need for him. He was always just a useful plasticine man with no real opinions, and no vision, remorphed periodically to fit the shape of prevailing trends.

Cameron is like Bob Kane’s Batman, a two-dimensional cipher originally invented to amuse simpletons, subsequently invested with character and motivation as required.

To say Cameron is meaningless is to dignify him with the suggestion of anti-meaning. He is beyond meaning. And now the way is clear for whoever is really writing this story – Lord Ashcroft, Paul Dacre, or maybe even John Major, playing a long game – to have him replaced.

In case George Osborne gets any ideas, Boris Johnson is keen to pull rank. The mayor’s spiky pun about “hookers”, at last week’s Influential Londoner awards, reminded Osborne that there is a shit-filled slop-bucket of Damocles ready to rain down on him at a moment’s notice, only deflected last time around by the quiet cooperation of the then News Of The World editor, and future Cameron aide, Andy Coulson. Clearly, Boris the inveterate playground bully didn’t get the post-Corbyn memo about everyone being nice to each other in public from now on.

Given what has been made to stick to Cameron, it is impossible to predict what the machine might use to destroy its next spent servant. If we were told George Osborne used to employ chained naked gimps as human pencil sharpeners we’d probably go with it.

In a way then, Louise Mensch was right, but for the wrong reasons. Does it matter if David Cameron did Netflix and chill with a dead hog? So what? What matters is who is telling us this, and why, and what power do they wield? But, we’ve been so busy laughing at an amusing jpeg of Peppa Pig running away from the prime minister, it’s a question we haven’t found time to ask.

Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 until 8 Jan.