In the late 80s I used to do standup at a Soho club called Raging Bull, run by the young Eddie Izzard. At half-time we shared our dressing room with male strippers from The Paul Raymond Carnival of Erotica. They would sit naked in their chairs, casually chatting and masturbating, but not for pleasure, merely to keep their members at the maximum tumescence for public display, the legal definition of an erection being 45 degrees.

I for one feel this definition is too exacting, and hope that one of the benefits of leaving the European Union will be a relaxation in the erection rules. In fact, I wonder if, secretly, it is a desire to set our own standards on what level of tumescence constitutes an erection that has made Mark Francois, for example, such a zealous Brexiteer.

It is hard to believe my accidental encounter with the sharp end of the sex business ever happened now. I was 20, and I was sitting in a room in Soho watching naked men masturbating. It was everything my worried gran had warned me showbiz would be.

The Mull of Kintyre famously juts out from mainland Scotland at exactly the same angle as that of the legal penis definition, and it is said that for many years the British Board of Film Censors used an image of the peninsula to judge the legality of an onscreen erection, the outcrop first employed to analyse sex scenes in Tinto Brass’s 1979 epic, Caligula.

I have a confession. The opening of this column is cut and pasted from notes towards my new standup show, Snowflake/Tornado, which previews at London’s Leicester Square theatre from the 24th. On Tuesday morning I travelled to the lighthouse at the bell end of the Mull, the closest mainland point to the Northern Irish coast, to shoot some footage for a multimedia climax to the piece, based around my youthful memories of the Soho dressing room incident.

In the dawn mist of the Mull, I looked across the sea towards Northern Ireland, and noticed, on the beach, a strange mixture of surveyors in high-vis jackets, and druidic figures in dark robes, waving sextants and staffs respectively. Cloaked men were chanting, “We build a bridge, a bridge of lies.” Back then, I had no idea what they meant.

Later that day, on my Campbeltown hotel television, I saw Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-the-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Turds Johnson declare his intention to build a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland, something, he quickly pointed out “that Jeremy Corbyn would be too chicken-frit to do!”

Turds has form here. In my newly published study of Brexit, March of the Lemmings, I detail Turds’ previous declaration of bridge-building intent. On 18 January 2018, as the EU’s transition deal stance hardened, and a discredited Turds doubled down on his disputed £350m NHS dividend lie, the then foreign secretary promised a 22-mile motorway crossing from England to France, an obvious dead cat distraction from the gathering Brexit storm.

Whenever he's under pressure, Turds announces, in a mad panic, that he will build some kind of bridge

No one seems to remember this now, but Turds’ wall-spaffed envelope-back spunk-burst of an idea was swiftly dismissed by the UK Chamber of Shipping with an understated rebuttal: “Building a huge concrete structure in the middle of the world’s busiest shipping lane might come with some challenges.” Turds’ London Garden Bridge project had already ended in ignominy.

It is as if Turds has a strange bridge-based Tourette syndrome. Whenever he finds himself under pressure, Turds’ default setting seems to be to announce, in a mad panic, that he will build some kind of bridge. And by the time of his Tuesday bridge announcement, Turds has been sorely stressed.

On Monday morning Turds was easily bested in his beloved classical allusion stakes by Ireland’s Leo Varadkar, whom Turds presumably considers a bumboy. And in the evening Turds saw parliament dissolve in a haze of rousing oppositional folk singing and chants of “shame on you”, which was not good optics.

Normally reserved procedure-nerds lay themselves across the retiring Speaker like Spearmint Rhino lapdancers. Mark Francois, who seemed to have taken ketamine, stood up to ramble prophetically about a bell tolling, and whom it was tolling for, a Peter Glaze Cassandra in the Crackerjack Trojan War. But when I look at Mark Francois I know the Bell End tolls for him.

By Tuesday afternoon, questions of funding, construction material strength, and the problem of unexploded Second World war munitions in the straits between Scotland and Northern Ireland had already thrown Turds’ latest bridge boast into doubt. I went down to the beach again, assuming the figures there had some connection to the project.

A bearded wizard figure chanted into the waves, “Come, oh lies! Take physical form! Bend to the will of Boris!” I caught the eye of a bewildered engineer, hard-hatted head bent into the wind. “I know, I know,” he said, “we’re here on the orders of Dominic Cumming. We’re to build Boris’s Irish bridge from the strongest, most indestructible material available.” I asked what that material was. “Mr Cumming’s and Mr Johnson’s lies, apparently,” said the engineer, nonplussed. “They believe they can withstand anything.”

On Wednesday I watched the hotel television while I waited for the film crew. Suddenly, it seemed that Turds’ proroguing had been declared illegal. Parliament might reconvene.

There appeared to be some consternation down on the beach too. Staffs were snapped in two. Surveying equipment was hurled into the sea. An engineer bellowed into a mobile phone. One of the druids sat down on a rock to roll a pacifying joint.

• Stewart Lee will be reading from his new book, March of the Lemmings, at Word on the Water in Granary Square, near King’s Cross, London at 2pm today (free); his new standup show, Snowflake/Tornado, is at the Leicester Square theatre, London, from 24 October, then touring from February 2020