Even for those who’ve been stockpiling I-told-you-sos for two years, there really is zero satisfaction in watching Brexit secretary Dominic Raab wanly assure a parliamentary committee that, post-Brexit, “there will be adequate food”. Just like the al-Qaida number three job used to be, the DExEU gig really is dead men’s shoes. Give it a year and it’ll be Secretary of State Ray Mears.

Either way, Raab’s is perhaps the most inspirational vision of the UK’s post-EU future since Chris Grayling explained last October that British farmers would simply have to grow more food. The good news is the uplands are sunlit; the bad news is we all have to till them. Unfortunately, there’s a nine-month import hold-up on ploughshares, so you’ll need to fashion a tool from your defunct maroon passport. Or as the furious National Farmers’ Union responded to Grayling: “We haven’t had a food policy for 43 years.”

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Well, it’s taken nine months, but we have a food policy now. And it’s to get this government – this government! – to mastermind the stockpiling of it. I guess this could unintentionally double as our obesity policy. Having ploughed through Raab’s testimony a couple of times, it seems that the government is not going to stockpile the food itself – the food companies are going to do it. It’s a plan that showcases politicians’ total failure to understand both companies, and food.

In many ways, though, a no-deal Brexit feels like the next step in Britain’s 15-year fetishisation of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. No-deal will allow the nostalgic populace to inhabit other second world war memes such as Dig for Victory, Prepare Your Tin Cans For War, and Rationing Means a Fair Share For All Of Us. All of these are much more practical than the UK’s negotiating strategy hitherto, which has amounted to disagreeing with gravity in Daily Mail comment articles, or screaming “You need to think creatively!” at the tide.

Speaking of which, Raab went to Brussels this week, having just unleashed a Daily Mail comment article entitled My Brexit War Cry. Reading this as he journeyed to a showdown with the EU was a bit like seeing Norman Wisdom approaching a banana skin and wondering what on earth was going to happen next. Spoilers! By now, you may have seen how Dominic’s “Brexit war cry” turned out, as he nodded along to Michel Barnier giving him nul points. I guess Dominic’s Winston Churchill in the sheets, Churchill-the-insurance-dog in the streets. By the time the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator got to the bit where he explained the Chequers deal was up merde creek, Raab was wearing that specific facial expression that translates as: never mind our money and borders, I urgently need to take back control of my sphincter. I assume his headset interpreter was simply whooping: “Welcome to the EU, bitch!”

As for the Chequers deal turning out to be another Wisdom/banana skin interface, it isn’t perhaps the most enormous shock. No shit we can’t collect the EU’s customs for them post-Brexit. This is like me telling Barbra Streisand I’ll run ticketing for her next farewell tour in exchange for a couple of seats. I mean, she’s a famously relaxed lady – but I imagine she’d decline the “opportunity”. You need to think creatively, Barbra.

Thus Theresa May’s grim avant garde theatre cycle continues. Waste time getting an agreement on an idea that has already been rejected by the EU. Take it to the EU. Get rinsed; repeat. On Thursday, Barnier explained that attempts to appeal to EU leaders over his head were a waste of time. On Friday, Theresa May was in Austria to attempt to appeal to EU leaders over his head.

Waiting in the wings, still, is rapidly mutating superbug Boris Johnson, who presumably hopes that a post-Brexit medicines crisis will leave Britain incapable of resistance to him. Having terminally destroyed his appeal to social liberals, soft Labour voters, graduates and so on, the former foreign secretary is in search of new constituencies. To this end, it has emerged that he has been in talks with far-right ethno-nationalist Steve Bannon.

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This feels quite a turnaround for a man who has spent much of the past few years pulling a Silence of the Lambs, and trying to sew himself a Winston Churchill suit out of his various electoral victims. Part of these efforts, you will recall, was Boris’s Churchill biography that ended up being historically revealing – not of its subject, of course, but its author. According to Johnson, all politicians are self-interested gamblers with events, and Churchill “put his shirt on a horse called anti-Nazism … his bet came off in spectacular fashion”. What’s not to love about this Bet365 take on Hitler? Try to imagine Ray Winstone’s disembodied head popping up as the Polish Jews were ghettoised and offering you 2-1 on the invasion of France. You just know Boris would have offered you any number of in-play markets on the Third Reich.

So he’s now putting his shirt on Steve Bannon. He’s hardly the first guy to put his shirt on Bannon – it’s why Bannon always wears two shirts. As for the colour of Boris’s shirt, if we may mangle this shirt metaphor still further, it is starting to look faintly … black? Isn’t it?

In one of the “alternative branches of the future” his friend Dominic Cummings is always twatting on about, maybe Boris could be made to be prime minister of his mess until he died. No exit. A bit like the gluttony victim in the movie Seven, who is strapped in and made to gorge himself until his insides rupture. Would this be fitting punishment for Johnson, whose entire career has been powered by every deadly sin at one time or another? Something to contemplate in the food queue, perhaps.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist