Dear readers, it has been an honour to try to write this week’s supposedly funny column about Brexit for you. But I regret to say that, after a long and painful struggle through Wednesday 14 November and the morning of Thursday 15 November, attempting to write a funny column on this week’s proposed Brexit deal, I have found that, for my part, I cannot complete it.

Throughout my attempts to deliver this week’s funny column, I have been hampered by the fact that Brexit moves either at impossible speed, or remains in a state of terminal inertia. I am like a photographer, commissioned to document the offspring of the hideous forced mating of a slug and a hummingbird, still wondering what shutter speed I should use. It has proved impossible to reconcile the need to provide a column that will still make sense on Sunday, with the demand that it is delivered to my editor on Thursday morning.

I hadn’t quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the Observer and you look at how it works, it is particularly reliant on content being delivered in advance of the paper being printed. I think probably the average reader might not be aware of the full extent to which the choice of content in the finished newspaper is dependent on stuff being written in advance of publication.

Who caused the Brexit disaster, I wondered aloud on Wednesday morning, as I looked for a peg to hang this flimsy piece on. Was it Disaster Capitalists, like Arron Banks, planning to profiteer from the chaos? Was it Disaster Socialists, like Jeremy Corbyn, hoping to home-bake a better Britain from the wreckage in his Islington patisserie?

Was it Disaster Racists, like my relative who voted Leave to “get rid of the Pakistanis and Indians”, and whose existence will now be questioned in below-the-line comments on the online version of this piece, accusing me of inventing a straw man to demonise stupid Leave voters, as if there were any need to fabricate one. Or was it the Disaster Johnsons, like Boris Picaninny Watermelon Letterbox Cake Disaster Johnson, hoping to drop an Etonian biscuit into his reflection in the melted molten metal puddle of post-Brexit Britain, and let lustful nature take its course?

Whoever is to blame, as Wednesday afternoon turned into Wednesday evening, and my 10am Thursday morning deadline loomed, the full impossibility of delivering the mildly satirical column expected of me by both my readers and my editor began to dawn on me.

I emailed my editor to ask if this week’s piece could be absent from Sunday’s printed edition of the Observer, and then belatedly inserted into the online edition, by unilateral agreement, perhaps in as much as two years’ time, as a kind of satirical column backstop, when the meaning of the week’s events finally becomes clear. But, like the EU, she is inflexible and cruel, and rejects my unilateral backstop arrangement, and instead demanded that I continue to provide the levels of content I had been contracted for at the time stipulated.

During Wednesday afternoon, on talk radio, the phrase “vassal state” started to emerge as a mantra, chanted by angry people who didn’t understand it, and I wondered if this was the sort of thing that might fill up a paragraph or two.

Indeed, the same furious Leavers now fixated on the “vassal state” previously offered up the words “WTO rules” as if they were a protection against euro-serpents. And what did “vassal state” mean exactly? Perhaps I could have pretended that it meant we wouldn’t be able to import or export our own Vaseline, or decide ourselves what was an appropriate use for it, and then make a column out of that idea? Perhaps not?

Ultimately, you deserve a column which can satirise the week’s Brexit events with conviction and understanding

I waited for two and half hours, from five until 7.30pm, for Theresa May to come out of No 10 and solve the riddle of the Brexit sphinx, hoping I could make a column out of her statement. I started drinking cider and began to find the word “backstop” funny in and of itself, as if it were some kind of innuendo. I wondered how, as a vassal state without its own supply of Vaseline, we would cope with our backstop arrangements. My friend Kevin Eldon, who plays an old wizard in Game of Thrones, suggested the vassal/Vaseline/backstop idea could perhaps be linked to the notion of “frictionless trade”.

For a while I thought maybe I could make a whole column out of this trivial and smutty conceit, but I realised it would leave everyone dissatisfied, diminish my standing in the columnist community, and discredit the Observer newspaper, and that a bad column was perhaps worse than no column at all.

In short, I cannot reconcile the content of the proposed column with the standards expected from me by both my readers and my editor. This is, at its heart, a matter of public trust. I appreciate that you may disagree with my judgment on this issue. I have weighed very carefully the alternative courses of action which I could take. Ultimately, you deserve a column which can satirise the week’s Brexit events with conviction and understanding. I am only sorry, in good conscience, that this column is not that column and so I hereby announce that I am abandoning this week’s column forthwith, shrugging my shoulders with a “will this do” insouciance, pressing send, and leaving someone else to deal with the mess I have made.

My respect for you and the fortitude you have shown while reading this difficult column remains undimmed.

Stewart Lee is appearing with Liza Tarbuck in Comedians Sing the Christmas Hits, a benefit for Action Duchenne at the Bloomsbury theatre, London, on 4 December; and with Mawaan Rizwan in Choose Laughs Festive Special at the Playhouse, London, on 9 December; and with Athena Kugblenu and Rosie Jones in A Belter for the Shelter, in aid of the Hackney winter night shelter, at the Hackney Empire, London, on 19 February