‘Everyone will have the food they need,” declared Michael Gove to Andrew Marr last Sunday, denying both the lies of Project Fear and the hysterical, biased, ill-informed and suppressed research of his own department.

On Tuesday, as the Commons camera drifted past Ken Clarke, I saw the Brexit cheerleader Iain Duncan Smith picking his nose and eating his own bogeys. Iain Duncan Smith, it appears, will not only have the food he needs, he will also have the food he deserves.

Dominic Cumming held back most of his Leave campaign budget to direct-market lies to 7 million unwitting Facebook users immediately prior to the referendum he helped rig. Leave agitators know all about surveillance. Presumably then, Iain Duncan Smith allowed his sickening mid-debate snack to be caught on camera deliberately. But why?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Backbench occupation: Iain Duncan Smith. Photograph: BBC Parliament ( screengrab)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The honourable member for Chingford on Tuesday. Photograph: BBC Parliament ( screengrab)

Gobbling nostril refuse can have hidden health benefits. If he ate enough schnoz manure, Iain Duncan Smith could theoretically make his body immune to bacteria, like a Marvel superhero given powers by the accidental ingestion of gallons of mucus. That which does not kill us makes us stronger.

Though superficially sickening, Iain Duncan Smith eating his own conk filth is as life-enhancing as if he were to drink his own urine, though it would doubtless be disrespectful for Iain Duncan Smith to do either of these while Ken Clarke was speaking, especially directly from the source.

Tellingly, Iain Duncan Smith did not even lean forward to offer any of his hand-mined nosegays to Theresa May, who was sitting just in front of him, and would doubtless have loved to lick dry mucus balls from the debonair Brexiter’s fingers.

On Wednesday lunchtime, I watched prime minister’s questions live on TV, wondering if I might catch another glimpse of Iain Duncan Smith feasting on different by-products of his own body, while lying Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Turds Johnson avoided all Corbyn’s direct questions.

Perhaps Iain Duncan Smith would be caught scraping wax out of his own ears and spreading it on a Jacob’s Cracker; or licking his own belly-button fluff off a stick as if it were fairground candyfloss; or sprinkling dried smegma flakes from beneath his foreskin on to a strawberry ice cream and saying: “Yum! Yum! I love eating smegma!” Everyone will have the food they need.

Commentators who view Turds’ adviser Cumming as an omnipotent Rasputin assume nothing happens in his Brexit gazebo by accident. Even Cumming’s reported red wine rampage around Portcullis House on Tuesday night may have been calculated to suggest he was unhinged enough to accelerate Britain off the cliff.

But which part of the Game Theory strategy book was it that encouraged Cumming to make a former Scots Guard eat his own dried nasal mucus off his own fingertip in full view of millions of viewers, like some horrific snot-gobbling circus freak in a downbeat midwestern carnival sideshow?

Turds performed each of Cumming’s pronouncements against a backdrop of increasingly hostile yowling, eventually disintegrating into the sadomasochistic Friars’ Roast of Turds’ Wednesday night evisceration

Did Cumming plan Iain Duncan Smith’s visible consumption of his face filth as a distraction from the new government’s ongoing Brexit bungle, just as the ostentatious arrival of a compliant, and thus criminally complicit, Welsh dog at 10 Downing Street was clearly timed to hit the front pages and eclipse Turds’ continued humiliations? If this was the case, it worked for me.

Last week, Cumming made Turds attempt to gull the opposition into backing an election, in order to have the numbers to force through a no-deal Brexit. Turds performed each of Cumming’s pronouncements against a backdrop of increasingly hostile yowling, eventually disintegrating into the sadomasochistic Friars’ Roast of Turds’ Wednesday night evisceration.

On Tuesday, Cumming suddenly lost his majority and then dramatically removed the whip from the grandson of the Jamaican reggae singer Winston Reedy, a totemic figure to the Tory party generally, and Turds specifically, who once ate jerk chicken with David Cameron at Oxford’s Haile Selassie Eating House in the mid-80s.

If no deal is successfully legislated against, and Cumming is unable to force an election by some backdoor method, then Turds may be trapped in ineffectual office, a Netto Prometheus, chained to the dispatch box, his liver pecked out anew every day by the crows of truth. In the bright lights of parliament, Turds is as strange and tragic as the Fonz with his laugh track removed. And yet here am I, still fixated instead upon Iain Duncan Smith, lapping his bacteria-ridden slime off his hands. Cumming is an evil genius. He played me like a pipe.

In his book Gastronaut, the TV chef Stefan Gates, who is one of the naked children running away on the sleeve of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, says 44% of people surveyed admit to having eaten their own dried nasal mucous in adulthood and maintains that “our body has been built to consume snot”, though not exclusively.

But that means that 56% of people, in the largest and most conclusive referendum of dried nasal mucous consumption ever, did not want to eat their own dried nasal mucous. Iain Duncan Smith must respect their feelings too if he is to heal this broken land, even though he himself is an enthusiastic consumer of mucus.

The big red bus, with “Let’s Suck Our Own Mucus Off Our Own Fingers and Eat It and Fund the NHS Instead” written on its side, is discredited. Iain Duncan Smith must advance toward the electorate in a spirit of compromise, a dried clod of his own snot on one index finger, the other index finger scrupulously clean, showing that he is at the heart of the party that can unite both extremes of broken Brexit Britain.

Everyone will have the food they need. You are living in a failed state.

• Stewart Lee’s new book, March of the Lemmings, is out now, and his new standup show Snowflake/Tornado is at the Leicester Square theatre, London, from 29 October, with national tour from February