On Tuesday, the unflappable Conservative party leadership hopeful Theresa May opined that high levels of immigration make it “impossible to build a cohesive society”. To be fair, so do massive social inequality, a lack of affordable housing and systematic corporate tax avoidance on an industrial scale by the government’s friends and backers. Ka-pow! Take that Tory scum! Oh look. There’s egg on your Savile Row suit. Never mind. Maybe a poor child would like to lick it off for their breakfast.

Social cohesion isn’t helped either, of course, by the culture secretary’s anti-BBC plans to kill off Doctor Who, David Attenborough and the stay-at-home mums’ ecstasy-generation CBeebies heartthrob Mr Bloom, who provides private spring onion-based fantasies that glue many a failing marriage together when the lights go out.

In fact, the best thing the right has done for social cohesion lately was to spread rumours about its own ceremonial figurehead romancing a dead pig’s disembodied face, which at least brought the country together for 24 hours, before the goldfish-memoried populace promptly forgot about it, like fracking and that boy on the beach.

On the same day as the unflappable May’s pronouncement on immigration, the all too flappable public liability and professional whey-face Jeremy Hunt struggled out of his scold’s bridle and made his annual emergence from behind his tree of shame to declare that his wife was Chinese.

Then Jeremy went on to suggest we should all work harder, like those Chinamen in the blue pyjamas and curly slippers they have in cowboy films. But we don’t want any of them coming here of course, however hard they work, unless it’s as wives. That stupid Hunt (trad arr).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by David Foldvari.

Unpack Theresa May’s anti-immigration statement and it dissolves into qualifiable anxieties about how schools and housing and hospitals will accommodate rapid population growth. But it is clearly phrased to compress down neatly into more alarming headlines, like the Telegraph’s brutal “Migration ‘harming society’’’, designed to play well with hateful people historically ill-attuned to nuance, such as Conservative voters and newspaper editors.

On the Today programme the same morning the increasingly flappable prime minister, David William Donald Cameron, pigheadedly refused to distance himself from the comment. In fact he had clearly been briefed to endorse it, despite the fact it can obviously be simplified to support a racist agenda. Dave is either a cynic or an idiot. Either way, he’s off soon to a brace of directorships, a glacial Scandinavian box set, and a heaving cheeseboard of the bassist from Blur’s Peripatetic Wigwam. Some other mug can muck out the stable now.

While it’s not racist to oppose immigration, is it still racist, in 2015, to be racist? And is it acceptable to make clanking cultural generalisations? It was on 3 October that the Daily Mail content provider Amanda Platell introduced the notion of a chocolate mosque into the collective subconscious. But still, more than a week later, Platell’s enormous chocolate mosque continues to loom over my imagination like an enormous chocolate mosque, an image so absurd that it becomes a viable metaphor for its own self.

In case the news-blip passed you by, Platell made minor chocolate ripples by suggesting in print that a middle-class woman called Flora Shedden, and her chocolate carousel, were booted off the BBC’s Bake Off cake contest in favour of Muslim mum Nadiya Hussain, gay doctor Tamal Ray and “new man” Ian Cumming, because she wasn’t “politically correct” enough. Perhaps, wrote Platell, “if she’d made a chocolate mosque she’d have stood a better chance”.

Let’s subject Platell’s statement to the same scrutiny May’s will doubtless undergo this week. The idea that a chocolate mosque would have scored better than a chocolate carousel suggests a baking competition in which, as well as for the technical quality of the cake, points are also awarded for the meaning and cultural significance of the thing that the cake is made to look like.

The idea that Shedden lost because she didn’t make a chocolate mosque would only hold water had she been in competition with other cakes that had also been baked into the shape of culturally, socially or politically significant icons, saturated with meanings designed to appeal to the liberally biased judges of Platell’s fecund imagination; ie a sponge Unitarian chapel, a meringue women’s refuge, a fudge abortion clinic, or an icing sugar Tom Daley. As this was not the case, and her fellow competitors’ cakes were not baked in shapes smothered with inference, it is spurious to suggest that the outcome of the cake contest was decided on these terms.

Bake Off is PC? Show me a reality show that isn’t contrived | Gaby Hinsliff Read more

An obvious subtext to Platell’s story is that the other contestants were favoured, irrespective of the quality of their cake work, because they fulfilled some kind of politically correct quota, such as “Muslim mum” and “gay doctor”. But the idea that this could be a deciding factor is undermined by the presence of the third victor, Ian Cumming, for whom the best denigrating epithet that the increasingly desperate Platell can find is “new man”, a phrase last used pejoratively by a woman wearing legwarmers in the early 1980s.

Indeed, we are all “new men” now. While Richard Hammond may, in a public and professional capacity, have failed to prevent his boss punching his employee in the face, he almost certainly changes babies’ nappies and loads the dishwasher at home. Times have changed.

I am a professional humorist, and objectively the third most critically acclaimed British standup comedian of the 21st century. If I write a stupid thing, on some level I invite you to assume it was deliberate, and that I have, to some extent, created a secondary “columnist” persona, in which I take on the role of the sort of person who would write the absurd things that I am writing, such as this sentence for example.

Amanda Platell, on the other hand, is an actual Daily Mail journalist and a former press secretary to the genuine William Hague, a man who really exists, albeit indeterminately. There is no reason to assume we are supposed to take the things she says as if they were meant as satirical mirror-images of received idiotic thought, unless of course Platell has been in extremely deep cover, consolidating the credibility of her chosen clown identity, for decades now.

If that isn’t the case, then it seems the contrived and demonstrably invalid “chocolate mosque” idea was designed to inflame a particular sort of monetisable sentiment, also evident in the provocative headlines composted down from Theresa May’s Conservative conference speech. “Here they are, coming over here, destabilising society and winning Bake Off. With their chocolate mosques.”

Stewart Lee’s A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 until 8 Jan. Details at stewartlee.co.uk