But once Leave actually won the referendum, this comic universe imploded. Some lies – I am going to ban Muslims and build a wall – can lead to power because they connect, however tenuously, to theoretically possible acts of government. ‘An EU rule that says you can’t recycle a teabag’ connects to nothing. It is like Noam Chomsky’s famous example of a sentence that conforms to the structure of a grammatical assertion without being a statement of anything at all: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. It is not even false – its truth content is zero.
