In this rabbit hole of an August, politics is morphing into satire

“Why can’t you believe that Rupert Murdoch might have actually acquired a conscience?” inquired an email correspondent, incensed at a facetious reference to the News Corp overlord’s professed admiration for Jeremy Corbyn. “You should try it.” Try acquiring a conscience, or try acquiring the belief that Murdoch has just acquired one? (Presumably on the billionaire black market, where I’m told you can purchase the conscience of a dead Victorian child for the price of a mining concession in the Urals or an authenticity algorithm.)

I get a lot of this correspondence nowadays, and I’ll level with you: I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more. Once angry lefties start telling you to give Rupert Murdoch a break, I don’t think we’re even down the rabbit hole any longer. Geologists/quantum physicists: is it possible the rabbit hole had a concealed basement, which has recently been opened up, forming a portal into another dimension which makes Wonderland look like a place of absolute suburban unremarkability?

One day you’re being presented with the idea of the maximum wage in a bottle marked “Drink me”, and imagining waving all the footballers off to La Liga or Serie A or wherever, finally relieved of the top-flight game we loathe so much. The next, you’re being barred as a red Tory from a club willing to accept Murdoch as a member. For lovers of rolling auto-satire, this is certainly an exciting time to be alive.

In this fast-moving WTFscape, the only newspaper which is not cast as Tory or red Tory is the Morning Star, whose circulation must be due a vast spike as all those betrayed and conscientious readers start to dutifully put their money where their mouth is. I have to confess a genuine fondness for the Star over the years, but my feeling is that they do occasionally underplay biggish news. I still retain a 2001 copy of the paper in which the splash was: “Unions Gear Up To Defend Schooling”. Taking up less than a third of page two was a story headlined “Terrorists Destroy World Trade Centre”.

Given how many satires are set 20 minutes into the future, there is a certainly a temptation to look at aspects of events in Greece and wonder if they are some blacker forerunner to developments just around the corner for us. Rebels have broken away from Syriza to form a new anti-austerity party, while prime minister Alexis Tsipras has resigned to remind the inventors of democracy that you either use it thrice annually or lose it. I’m not sure if he’s now being called a red Independent Greek or a red Golden Dawner. Perhaps those who instinctively understand this area of the political Pantone chart could get in touch to help the rest of us adjust our records and remain au courant.

More satire back home, where to the delight of those who’d had enough of people banging on about antisemites he may have associated with, Jeremy Corbyn has chosen this moment to announce that he will apologise for the Iraq war if he wins the leadership election next month. Which is, let’s face it, such a Tony move.

I know David Cameron has kept the flame alive, issuing a heartfelt soz for Bloody Sunday. But the master of saying sorry for things absolutely everyone knew weren’t his fault was a certain Mr Blair, who kicked off his premiership with a calculated expression of regret for the Irish potato famine – “a complete exercise in moral vacuousness”, Jeremy Paxman later observed – and thereafter moved on to slavery. These pieces of politics are the cynical side of a coin whose sweeter obverse was the Harry Enfield character Jürgen the German, with his catchphrase: “I feel I must apologise for the conduct of my nation during the war.”

Whether Corbyn has ever been wrong about anything we have yet to learn, but we must hope that the new politics will be as profuse in its apologies for those errors as the old politics actually always was about things which no one thought were its fault anyway.

Whatever happened to August as we once knew it? Remember when this was an annual time of mysterious fins spotted off the coast of Cornwall, or crop circles, or killer Soviet chipmunks, or suggestions that Cristiano Ronaldo might be about to sign for Sunderland? That now looks like what we might call the sensible season, as opposed to a period when making a joke about a Corbyn supporter – one R Murdoch – is regarded as both uncharitable and gauche.

Against this increasingly malarial backdrop, I have sarcastically tried to acquire the belief that Murdoch has acquired a conscience, and I have honestly tried to feel positive about what seems to be an inevitable Corbyn victory. Neither’s taking. I’m absolutely appalled to say that I fear I have become, in at least these two areas of my life, sensible.

Why? Well, presumably it’s some function of parenthood, but I can never really be arsed to lavish much time analysing these things: with three children aged four and under, I find my downtime far better spent drinking margaritas or shouting at the telly. All I can tell you is the facts. I now routinely take baby wipes on train journeys; I mostly check the weather forecast; and, with the best will in the world, I do not believe that Jeremy Corbyn is going to stop the Tories being in power for 15 years. At least.

Let me be crystal clear: I do not want to be the person who thinks that, any more than I want to take the wretched Huggies on the train. I’d like the railways renationalised and the tax system intelligently overhauled. I’d love to see this nice chap win a general election and reopen the coalmines in some mysterious green way, and Rupert Murdoch turn out to be a cuddly uncle to the nation – he has favoured Jeremy because he always picks the winners, innit – and I’d love to think Labour could get out of the station without ending up covered in something really quite appalling. But it’s not going to happen.

Could the entire Labour leadership be a psychodrama about my lost youthful ideals and the need for babywipes? That theory feels increasingly sane – or certainly no less mad than the rest of it.