The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, says that, what with the Brexit shock and Theresa May’s snap election, our political events have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock – cheekily quoting the celebrated director’s maxim that a good film should start with an earthquake and then get the tension to rise relentlessly.

Earthquake plus tension? This feels more like a dreary rain shower, coinciding with a vote to criminalise umbrellas, followed by the news of the possible cancellation of a weekly village bus service. The black comic ennui of Britain’s collective exasperation at the new election is more like Mike Leigh than Hitchcock.

The Daily Mail summarised May’s intentions today in its headline Crush the Saboteurs, apparently quoting Lenin’s comments after the 1917 revolution: “Now we have carried out the will of the people, which is – all power to the Soviets. As for the saboteurs, we shall crush them.” So maybe the film director controlling events is Sergei Eisenstein, and we should visualise a silent black-and-white film of May’s face in closeup, as she declaims angrily, intercut with flickering sequences of remoaner peers.

Then again, Hitchcock did direct a film called Saboteur, which finishes with a wartime wrecker being chased up the Statue of Liberty. Perhaps he could have directed a new version that climaxed with May (played by Googie Withers) chasing Lord Mandelson (played by Anton Walbrook) up into the clockface of Big Ben and shooting him at one minute to midnight.

Hitchcock himself was politically reticent, a pro-American Atlanticist obviously, and an enthusiast for the US entering the European war in 1940. He would not have found British elections or European bureaucracy very engrossing. Spies and spying were always more his thing: he would have been far more interested in directing a movie called Kompromat, about the secret connections between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. His cold war movie Torn Curtain could be remade, to bring in references to Pyongyang.

But I think the film that Hitchcock could have made about the political events of the past few years is The Lady Vanishes 2. In Hitchcock’s 1938 original, a respectable lady is travelling by train across Europe from the obscure principality of Bandrika – and then mysteriously vanishes. To the astonishment of the heroine, played by Margaret Lockwood, none of the fellow passengers admits to ever having seen this lady. In Hitchcock’s new version, May would ride the pro-EU campaign bus across the country, an avowed remainer. But just before the referendum results came in, May would vanish. And no one in the Conservative party would admit to having been aware of any pro-remain lady called Mrs May. Finally, a fierce pro-leave figure called Mrs May would reappear in No 10 Downing Street and reveal that the whole business was a huge diversionary scheme to protect British sovereignty and flush out spies and saboteurs. Just before the credits, Hitchcock could finish on a sinister image of May’s triumphant grin superimposed in a dissolve-fade on the grille of her ministerial car.