Artificially intelligent humanoid sexual partners are now commercially available. And indeed, I have often wondered if I myself am in fact one such “sex robot”. My lovers always disengage from me in silently satisfied wonder, and rarely request second encounters, having had their expectations soul-shatteringly exceeded, their sexual futures rendered endlessly disappointing. I’m joking of course! I have been married for 12 years. There is nothing to see here.

But once, as a young adventurer, I crossed America by bus, arriving in Seattle in September 1994, three years after Peak Grunge, just in time to see the genre winding down with a local band called Peach, at the Crocodile Cafe. The ATM ran dry that night and a scenester at the bar bailed me out with the offer of his sofa. He seemed normal enough by the standards of the day – beanie hat, goatee beard, and pierced nipples poking through a T-shirt bearing the legend Public Castration Is a Good Idea.

To say that Matt’s apartment was a surprise would be an understatement. The walls were lined not with Tad and Mudhoney posters, but with the suspended forms of life-sized naked female dolls, of troubling anatomical accuracy, that he had made himself. “Don’t worry,” Matt said, “I’m not crazy or weird. I hope one day to make these dolls into artificially intelligent sex robots. Imagine having your own erotic mechanical slaves! Nachos?”

Last month, I saw Matt for the first time in 23 years, this time in a Guardian feature about the ethical dilemmas created by a newly available luxury product he had developed: lifesize, artificially intelligent sex robots. Then suddenly, events here at home made me realise I needed to speak to Matt McMutton again, and not as a potential customer!

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Last week Sarah Vine, who is married to Michael Gove, opened the scab-encrusted blowhole of her Daily Mail column once more, this time comparing Brigitte Macron, the wife of the new French president, who he met when he was her 15-year-old drama pupil, to the alleged child rapist Roman Polanski, and suggesting, not entirely unreasonably, that had the couple’s roles been reversed their marriage would seem “grotesque”.

But Sarah Vine is married to Michael Gove. And Michael Gove is, in turn, married to Sarah Vine. And the thought of either of them being married to anyone, let alone each other, is also grotesque, despite Vine being an acceptable four months her adopted husband’s senior.

And, uniquely, the notion of the Goves’ union remains equally grotesque, even when their ages are reversed to be more in line with those of a normal partnership. The image of a cluster of toads spawning in a dewpond is more pleasing to the mind’s eye, for unlike the dissembling Goves, the assembling toads are merely following their own natures, in accordance with the watchmaker’s perfect mechanism, amphibian messengers of Christ’s majesty eternal.

Of course I appreciate that the previous four sentences are unpleasant. They are deliberately so, as a mirror image of the Vine sensibility that inspired them. The cultural theorist James Naughtie explained to me on the Today programme, while screwing up his stupid red face like a baboon eating a thistle, that an earlier column of mine about the Goves and their ilk was “poisonous”. But to say a column about the Goves is poisonous is unnecessary, like saying that a slow-motion film of a cat vomiting is nauseating.

It is foolish of politicians and their guff-trumpets – and this is what Vine is here – to score points off their rivals’ choice of spouse, especially if you are Sarah Vine. And it is even more foolish to do so when Theresa May parades her husband Philip before the cameras of The One Show. The poor banker came across not as strong and stable, but like a tortured hostage forced at gunpoint to tell the people at home how kindly he is being treated.

Eighty-two kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls are free! But when will Philip May be free? And will he have any strong hope of readjusting to a stable life, where he is spared the endless repetition of the words “strong” and “stable”?

And why is Theresa May’s lower jaw permanently locked into the same sort of jutting/munching shape Eric Morecambe’s made when theatrically sucking a pipe? She has no pipe. How will Mrs May’s imaginary pipe face play with the Europeans? They will say, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

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I am no international trade negotiator (who is?), but can it be prudent, as we enter into talks with a newly united EU, determined to reaffirm its enlightenment values, for Sarah Vine, one of our chief Brexiters, and the spouse of a former cabinet member, to compare the French president’s wife to an alleged child rapist? How will this affect barista visas, roaming mobile phone charges, and the future dimensions of Toblerones?

However offensive the French first couple’s relationship, it at least seemed genuine. But, to me, there was a strange haunted empty quality to both Michael Gove and Philip May, the latter having vouchsafed to The One Show that he “quite liked ties although I’m not wearing one this evening”. This indefinable absence of the flame of being makes the idea of a relationship involving either Mr Gove or Mr May oddly implausible.

Troubled by a mysterious worry, on Thursday I called Matt. “The project stalled soon after we met,” he recalled, “It was initially too difficult to replicate the unpredictable workings of the complex female brain. But men’s brains were easy. They just thought about sports and neckties, so I turned out a couple of male dolls as practice. I only make the female dolls now, but for a few months in the mid-90s I had a small client list of successful rich women who wanted compliant partners. They didn’t mind if their sex robots had no real personality to speak of, as long as they’d take out the trash and eat the occasional tuna taco way down south in Dixie, if you get my drift. Mumble in the moss, man, mumble in the moss!”

“You don’t still have that list, do you Matt?” I asked. “Sure.” The two names from the old customer base that shocked me most meant nothing to Matt McMutton. But then he wasn’t a follower of British politics. When and where and why, I wondered, had the sinister switches been made? “So,” Matt continued, 5,000 miles away in the Pacific north-west, as the realisation dawned and I sat down in stunned horror, “you in the market for a sex robot? Or are you still dating humans, old school? Faggot!”

Stewart Lee is touring his new show, Content Provider, throughout 2017; see stewartlee.co.uk for details