I was not at all laughing at the possibility of "this could have been an entry book"; it could have. It could have maintained the plausibility of an eventual victory, too. I was laughing because I was fortunate enough to read it in draft and saw the way in which the text responded to Brexit and the way in which the Laundry's sins went from implied to overt to accumulated. But "accumulated" absolutely required the whole rest of the series. The mental image of a new reader tossed into this book is not that of someone having a good time.