The danger in meeting politicians is that they seem all right and then, as a comedian, it is much harder to summon up the manufactured anger required to despise them for personal commercial gain. I have a mortgage. I can’t afford to find myself thinking things like “You know, Ken Clarke isn’t so bad once you get to know him.” Hate is money! And I have to pump it out to a deadline!!

In the noughties I had a 25-minute routine about Michael Portillo looking like the Cuprinol wood stain goblin, which was gradually becoming the spine of a new three-hour show. But after I met Portillo on BBC1’s This Week, he seemed belatedly reasonable in that way that ex-Tories often do, and I found I could no longer suggest he was a wood stain goblin with any conviction. Another revenue stream ran dry.

I don’t like going on TV, but I will make an exception for This Week, of which I am a huge fan. People always ask me what Andrew Neil’s dogs are like in real life. To answer that question once and for all, Scrubber is nice, but Molly stinks and the BBC had to hush it up when she bit Jacob Rees-Mogg in his North East Somerset constituency. Though to be fair, Rees-Mogg had subjected the dog to a cruel and sustained floccinaucinihilipilification.

It’s time to reassert a fundamental principle, namely that there’s no excuse for bigotry

Last Sunday morning, I further compromised my embargo and appeared on Peston’s ITV politics niche, Peston’s Weekly Thought Nook™. Peston introduced himself to me while reclining in a makeup chair: “Hello, I’m Peston. And today I’ll be talking to ballroom-dancing politico Ed Balls, and Ukip’s Suzanne Evans. Stay with me.”

I thought Peston’s greeting oddly formal and impersonal, and then realised he was being filmed for a trailer, and was addressing the British public en masse, not me individually. I felt stupid for not understanding how TV worked, like when I was little and I thought Harold Wilson could see me through the television.

Next I went to the green room, which is showbiz language for the place where the stars wait their turn to go on TV with Peston, or Andrew Neil, or whoever’s show it is. In the old days it could have been Russell Harty for example. Or Gus Honeybun.

The green room doesn’t have to be green, or even a room. There isn’t a green room on This Week on BBC1 in case the Daily Mail says it’s too luxurious. On This Week there’s just some chairs in a corridor and a table with old fishing magazines on it, like at the proctologist’s. “Andrew Neil will see you now.” Peston is much better.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

I’m aware that writing about what happens in the green room is a betrayal of an unspoken showbiz-politics rule. Like Vegas, what happens in the green room stays in the green room. It’s supposed to be a safe space, in a theatre or at a TV studio, where performers and contributors shouldn’t feel they are being watched. Journalists went into my dressing room at the Leicester Square theatre and reported that I used Lynx deodorant. I felt violated.

Nowadays I find it very difficult being in the green room with younger, newer comedians, as I feel my age and supposed status mean I am permanently required to be in presidential mode. And I mean this in the old sense of “presidential”, meaning magnanimous, patient and generous, rather than in the modern sense of presidential, meaning being a corrupt, pussy-grabbing racist. How quickly words change their meanings.

In the Peston green room I sat next to Suzanne Evans from the Ukips. I tried to make small talk. She agreed that when Nigel Farage, earlier that week, had threatened to unleash a pussy-grabbing Trump sex attack robot on Theresa May, it had been a bit much.

Suzanne Evans from the Ukips was wearing a giant Remembrance Day poppy made of cloth. Jeremy Corbyn came on TV wearing a tiny badge of a poppy. I said, “Your poppy’s massive isn’t it Suzanne? Jeremy Corbyn’s is tiny. He’s a traitor, isn’t he?”

Suzanne Evans from the Ukips didn’t say much, and I worried that she had my card marked for being one of the liberal comedians that dominate all comedy now, to little or no effect in real terms. Perhaps she thought I was trying to generate material for a funny column. Which I wasn’t. At the time.

Later on, when Marine Le Pen came on the BBC news being really, really racist, Suzanne Evans from the Ukips shook her head disapprovingly, as if Le Pen had crossed a racist line in the alt-right sand. I started wondering about gradations of tolerance, of how our relationship with someone, however minimal, affects our attitude to them.

On Christmas morning 1995, I came down to our kitchen, hung over, and the first sentence that was said to me, on Christmas morning, apropos of nothing, was ‘You can say what you like about Hitler, but he had some good ideas. He just went about them the wrong way.” It was Auntie Hattie, on seasonal secondment from the old people’s home, praising Hitler, on Christmas Day! On Christmas Day!! On Christmas Day in the morning!!! Sieg Heil!!!!

But we make allowances for the madness of our relatives, because they are little old ladies, and little old men, and are a bit confused probably; but we must not allow ourselves to make allowances for far-right politicians and their followers. Because the American woman with mixed-race kids I talk to at swimming lessons every Tuesday is afraid to go home; and the day after Brexit, in our cosy comedy community, an Asian comedian was told to go back where he came from by an emboldened heckler at the Comedy Store, historic home of politically correct alternative comedy, the sort of incident I haven’t seen since the 80s.

And that’s why, after next week’s This Week, I’m not meeting any more TV politicians. These aren’t the times for self-loathing liberals to seek to understand the leaders of the global far right, or their supporters. That ship sailed when Trump put Breitbart into the White House. We should be in crisis-management mode. It’s time to reassert a fundamental principle, namely that there’s no excuse for bigotry, whichever alt-right buzzword you get Boris or Steve Bannon to rebrand it with. And if that means no more free green-room bacon sandwiches on Sunday morning for me, then so be it. We are all going to have to make sacrifices.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider is at Leicester Square theatre until 28 January and touring throughout 2017. See stewartlee.co.uk for details