We really have got our bunting in a twist. This is hardly surprising in the age of Brexit when questions of identity are fought over on a symbolic level. Why else does it matter if a local radio presenter and MEP (Nigel Farage) complains about the waving of EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms? Suddenly flags seem to matter.

There was a time without bunting and suddenly it was everywhere, nostalgia-invoking with its nod to the village fete, the homemade, a vision of Englishness, a reminder of the postwar celebrations. I blame Cath Kidston. But then I blame her for most everyday horror. And the retro nature of the bunting seen these days tells us a lot about where we are going. Sure there is ironic bunting and there is art bunting but bunt-central remains the Bake Off tent, the dreamspace of unperturbed Englishness. Inclusive and yet reassuring. Everything is lovely in the tent. No one pisses outside it or would even want to surely?

This is why when one of its stars, the grizzled biscuit pastry judge Paul Hollywood, does something as symbolically wrong as to be pictured wearing a Nazi uniform, the reaction is general hilarity. The photograph of Hollywood dressed as an SS officer wearing a swastika armband has only just surfaced but was taken 14 years ago when he went to a fancy dress party as a character based on the TV series ‘Allo ‘Allo!. He has now said that he is “absolutely devastated if this caused offence to anyone”. Here’s a tip: if you are not sure, best not dress as a Nazi.

Prince Harry made the same mistake at 20 when he attended a “colonials and natives” party. As you do. I have only ever seen actual Nazi uniforms when I was in Chile in the early 80s. This was during Pinochet’s time and the fact that people proudly kept them at home chilled me to the bone. Most people forgave Harry and they will forgive Hollywood for just being stupid.

#GBBOf’s Paul Hollywood stunned pub drinkers after turning up dressed in full Nazi officer uniformhttps://t.co/sJr27CcI5X pic.twitter.com/MsCaOKQvdZ — The Sun (@TheSun) September 10, 2017

But something else is going on at the moment, isn’t it? There is this desperate performance of an uncertain British identity: cakes, bunting, second world war larks. We are uncertain whether it is OK to make jokes about Nazi symbols, yet we are also being told that not to wave a union jack is unpatriotic. To wave an EU flag at the Proms is to be in denial about how people voted in the referendum. So says Farage, who understands symbols very well. He is very concerned about flags. He does not wear a Nazi uniform. Oh no.

Instead he attends and speaks at rallies of the far-right AfD party in Berlin as the guest of the granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister. When he was at school (Dulwich College) one of his teachers wrote to his head as she was so concerned with reports of his “publicly professed racist and fascist views”. Farage’s Breaking Point poster showing a long queue of migrants and refugees trying to get into the EU which appeared during the Brexit campaign was denounced by the former Belgian prime minister as “Nazi propaganda”.

Yet Farage professed surprise when he saw white supremacists marching in Charlottesville last month: “Cannot believe we’re seeing Nazi salutes in 21st century America” he tweeted. Really?

Here we come to the link between symbols and action. The domestication of far-right politics and its embrace by a Tory party with no discernible moral compass means that a battle about identity is being carried out via symbols. The right needs to recast the war as isolated-but-clever-little Britain against the rest of the world. History is rewritten as Farage poses gormlessly by a poster for Dunkirk.

Paul Hollywood may have thought it was ‘Allo ‘Allo! funny when he donned his smart casual SS officer look, but the image does not sit well with the deliberately constructed Britishness of the Bake Off tent, even if shrugged off as a mistake.

The German politician Beatrix von Storch who invited Farage to come and speak in Berlin has asked for border guards to use firearms on illegal immigrants “if necessary”. But she later claimed this was “a mistake” but a senior member of her party has described Berlin’s holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame”.

So the issue is not one of who waves a flag and who doesn’t. It is not one even of people who dress up as Nazis for fun, or accidentally. It is one of giving a platform to those who cavort with the offspring of Nazis while claiming to be patriots. No amount of flag-waving can conceal this rot.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist