When Frank Skinner and I were writing the lyrics to Three Lions, I remember suggesting that we should try to convey – as an alternative to the triumphalism of previous World Cup songs – the actual experience of being an England football fan: the bittersweet sense of hope v despair that the history of our national side engenders in supporters every time an international tournament rolls around. I like to think that we got some of that in there, that the lyrics did chime with some actual sense of the English experience, what John Updike called the “felt life”.

But obviously it wasn’t up there with this:

They want our prisoners to vote

They’ve taken all our fish. And money

Through the years

There’s endless regulation, red tape

It seems there’s no escape

Till the leave vote takes shape.

That is the second verse of Ukip parliamentary candidate Mandy Boylett’s reworking of Three Lions into an anthem of support for the campaign to leave the EU, available on YouTube, as of yesterday morning. Obviously, it’s brilliant just on the page, but really, as with all the best lyricists – Dylan, Lennon, Batt – you have to hear these words sung. To appreciate the power of Boylett’s poetic summation of the pain of so many years under the cosh of EU marine regulation, you have to hear the way she twists “fish” into “fi-ii-yy-ish”, mimicking, as she does so, the twisting of so many British cod into French and Dutch nets.

Similarly, the chorus is – well, I think the word I’m looking for is “amazing”.

Our flags red, white and blue

More than just a star

Only wanted trade

But now it’s gone too far.

It’s a brilliant observation, of course, that a star is only white, whereas the union jack is more than that: it’s also red and blue. Some cynics I know have suggested that “more than just a star” might be a lyric put in just to create a rhyme – a very pertinent rhyme, of course, because what sums up the anguish of Brexiters everywhere more than the extraordinarily original thought that some EU regulation has “gone too far”? – but I think by now we know Boylett is a better wordsmith than that. And anyway, even if it is a little crowbarred, myself and Frank Skinner put out, in 1996, a bootleg recording of some of our first drafts of Three Lions, which I suspect she may be subtly alluding to:

Three Lions on the shirt

Pickles has found a bone, look

Do it for Millichip, Bert

As he’s listed in the phone book.

But Boylett is also a modern pop artist. She understands that in contemporary culture, it’s not just about the words and the music, it’s also about the look. And you can talk Lady Gaga, or Madonna, or Kanye – hey, you can talk Bowie – but have any of them thought about singing about the downside of the Schengen area while dressed in spangly union-jack leotards, somewhat over-tight shorts and the strangest socks (they might not be socks) I’ve ever seen? All right, perhaps Geri Halliwell has, but even she never thought about putting two of herself onscreen, with the ingenious use of a blonde wig to help us tell them apart; one become two, indeed. Also – as Guardian contributor and major twitterer Alex Andreou pointed out to me– there is a real braveness in dressing like that and singing about only wanting trade.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds in the original Three Lions video.

All that and then, just when you think it can’t get any better, Boylett plays a masterstroke: she replaces our sample of the radio commentary to the 1966 World Cup final (“Good old England! England who couldn’t play football! England have got it in the bag!”) with – like John Barnes in World in Motion, but with a bit more natural soul – the words, of course, of Nigel Farage. It’s worth watching on the video. One would have to have a heart of Euro-stone – one would have to be bewitched indeed by the many attractions of Angela Merkel and Jean-Claude Juncker – not to be moved to tears by the sight of Nigel, in possibly the worst tie anyone has ever worn, telling “establishment politicians” to go and “sling their hook”. It’s just Nigel moving so out of his comfort zone.

I actually liked Mandy Boylett’s song. It’s not often in life you come across something not so bad it’s good, but so bad it’s absolutely fantastic. It made me and Frank laugh like drains. Plus, the truth about Brexit v Bremain is that most people, myself included, know Bruckallaboutit (for a long time I thought that both Brexit and Bremain were oat-based, keep-you-regular breakfast cereals). Whether or not we should stay in the EU is something that politicians and journalists get remarkably wound up about, but most common folk are either bored of the subject, or, more likely, feel excluded from the basic information they might need to decide about it, seeing as they haven’t actually read the 237 pages of the Treaty of Lisbon.

So we’re better off, I say, for Boylett. I think it should be our entry this year for Eurovision. And if we don’t win, it’ll prove that everything the leave-campaigners say about Europe is spot-on.

The paperback editions of David Baddiel’s The Person Controller and The Boy Who Could Do What He Liked, his £1 World Book Day book, are out now.