Last Monday I attended the worst family dinner I have ever experienced. It honoured a visiting American with whom we were barely acquainted, but were somehow obliged to entertain.

A few years previously our guest had suggested on a radio show that, despite thinking she was “crazy”, he could have “nailed” my late mother. She feared he was “stalking” her. Our guest had then clarified that he would only have had sex with my mother if she had an Aids test, perhaps because she had shaken hands with Aids sufferers.

Our guest had also called my own wife “nasty”, and dismissed climate change, a cause close to my green father’s heart, as a hoax. We made uneasy small talk with the American’s wife, whom we all knew he had cheated on with an adult film actress. It was a dreadful, awkward evening.

And then I woke up. I was not Prince Harry. And I was not having dinner with Donald Trump. I had merely fallen asleep in front of coverage of Trump’s state banquet after eating a red leicester.

In reality, selfless Prince Harry sucked up his humiliation, and the insults to his wife and dead mother, and did his royal best to secure the buccaneering post-Brexit trade future already guaranteed by his fellow diner Long John Liam Fox. But the reality of Trump’s visit was arguably more bewildering than any cheesy dream.

Donald Trump laughs with the Queen at a state banquet held at Buckingham palace. Photograph: Dominic Lipinski/AFP/Getty Images

At the banquet held in his honour, Trump praised the allies’ joint wartime effort against the tyranny of the Nazis, whom he seemed to view as uniformly bad. And yet, in 2017, Trump had said the neo-Nazi groups at Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally, where an anti-fascist protester was murdered, contained “some very fine people”.

American Nazis, of course, are likely to be “very fine”, reflecting as they do the understandable anxieties of the ordinary American voter. But second world war European Nazis were just bad, period.

Trump tweeted that he had been welcomed to the UK by thousands of well-wishers, but he demonstrably wasn’t, to our national shame. Trump was welcomed, instead, by a pathetic statue of him sitting trouserless on a toilet, and a childish Trump-baby shaped barrage balloon, later burst by a woman who is forbidden by law to approach water.

And in a field below Trump’s incoming flight, an infantile student had mown a frankly immature massive penis into the grass which, though it lacked the flecks of ejaculate and hairy testicular sack normally present on such images, was nonetheless utterly puerile. The anti-Trump demonstrators need to learn that, though they were entitled to dislike Donald Trump himself, it was wrong to disrespect the institution of the American presidency, which existed as an entity entirely separate from its incumbent.

In a similar fashion, Rick Jones, Monica Rambeau and Carol Danvers have all been Captain Marvel at different times, dumbass. Given the medical inaccuracy of their mown penises, it is not surprising that none of the stone-cold losers in Parliament Square on Tuesday understood this.

Quick Guide Trump's state visit: which family members are with him? Show Travelling Trumps When Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, arrive for a state visit to the UK on 3 June, they will reportedly be joined by the president’s four adult children and their spouses. Here's who is in the family entourage: Ivanka Trump Ivanka is Trump’s oldest daughter and works in the White House (unpaid) as an adviser to the president. Trump has relied on her often for overseas diplomacy, including sitting in for him briefly at a G20 summit, and he said he had considered naming her to head the World Bank. She has visited Ethiopia and the Ivory Coast on behalf of the administration to promote women’s rights. Before her father’s presidency, Trump ran her own fashion line. Jared Kushner Trump’s son-in-law is a White House senior adviser and the administration’s envoy to the Middle East (also unpaid). With his wife Ivanka he has also been the subject of a host of controversies – with a whistleblower alleging they were granted sensitive security clearances over the objections of career security experts. He has also been accused of conflicts of interest over his family’s sprawling real-estate empire. Kushner wears many hats in Washington. He is supposed to come up with a Middle East peace plan, as well as US immigration policy. Donald Trump Jr Trump’s eldest son and his brother, Eric, run their father’s business empire while he is in the White House. Officially, Trump Jr is executive vice-president of the Trump Organization. It was Trump Jr who met a Russian lawyer in an infamous Trump Tower meeting in New York in 2016, after the Russian offered him election ‘dirt’ on the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Kushner also attended. Although accepting campaign help from foreign nationals is illegal, the special counsel Robert Mueller said after investigating that there was not enough evidence to prove meeting participants knew they were breaking the law. Trump Jr may be accompanied by his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Fox News host. Eric Trump Eric Trump is the co-leader of the Trump Organization during his father’s presidency. He has defended his father from accusations of racism, and called the president’s critics “not even people”. He is parodied on the weekly US satirical comedy TV show Saturday Night Live and elsewhere as the not-so-sharp Trump brother, though supporters call this portrayal inaccurate. Most recently, a watchdog group has been pressing to find out how much it cost taxpayers when Eric and members of one of the family’s golf clubs travelled to Scotland to play the links. Lara Trump Lara Trump is a campaign adviser to Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and wife to Eric. A vocal defender of her father-in-law, she recently made headlines by saying the decision to let in large numbers of migrants fleeing war- and poverty-torn countries for Europe was “one of the worst things that ever happened to Germany”.

Tiffany Trump Tiffany is the lowest profile of Trump’s adult children and his only child with second wife Marla Maples. She headed to London ahead of the rest of her family. The 25-year-old is a graduate student at Georgetown Law in Washington DC. She travelled to the Cannes film festival earlier this month with her wealthy boyfriend, in a trip that has drawn scrutiny over its cost to taxpayers in terms of security for the presidential daughter.

As Trump touched down on Monday, foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt described the decision by the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, to boycott Trump’s banquet as “virtue signalling of the worst kind”.

Previously, the phrase “virtue signalling” had been confined to the sticky pages of Spiked, or angry YouTube rants posted by involuntarily celibate 33-year-old men still living in their mothers’ basements until Steve Bannon recognises their talents and gives them a job at Breitbart.

It was good to see Jeremy Hunt introduce the phrase “virtue signalling” into the mainstream, as it can only help elevate a national political discourse that is rapidly becoming unhelpfully polarised and terminally toxic. Perhaps Hunt can heal broken Britain.

At his royal banquet, Trump paid tribute to the 24,000 British, American and Canadian troops that fought the Nazis in the D-day landings. But, having listened to the rhetoric of the preceding days, I had begun to wonder if the allied troops that plunged into those cold and foreboding French waters weren’t just virtue-signallers of the worst kind themselves. They seem rather too keen to let us all know how much they disliked fascism.

Led astray by that Marxist liberal elitist Winston Churchill, the allied troops of the D-day landings were unable to distinguish their dislike of Adolf Hitler from the institution of the chancellorship of Germany, which existed as an entity entirely separate from its incumbent, and deserved their respect. And there were, after all, probably “some very fine people” in the Nazi ranks.

I am joking of course, and attempting to turn the values of Trump’s apologists back on themselves, though one has to make this explicit in these irony-free days, where all comment is shorn of context and shat out into the shitosphere. But, I confess, I did look in on Tuesday’s anti-Trump protest.

On The Mall, I fell into step behind a trio of middle-aged men in purple Harringtons, loudly looking for trouble. When they got to Parliament Square they targeted elderly protesters and phone-filmed themselves accusing them of disrespecting “our boys”, though there was no anti-armed forces angle evident.

I thought about Prince Harry, one of “our boys”, who fought on the frontline in Afghanistan as a helicopter gunner; who flew towards fate and did not dodge duty, despite the Taliban’s declared intent to kill him.

And I thought of Harry at Monday’s events, hugging the tail end of Trump’s train, like a dishonoured cuck, as the alt-right would say, absorbing the humiliation of his wife and mother, rained down by the visiting alpha male in a stinging golden shower.

The prince, whose family has been forced to dine on the wrong side of history’s table, was obediently impotent in service of the national interest, and a compliant pawn in Trump’s re-election campaign. We owe our war heroes more than this sorry capitulation. Don’t we?

Stewart Lee’s new standup show, Snowflake/Tornado, is at the Leicester Square theatre, London, 29 October-5 January, with national dates to follow