These are the facts the Tories don't want you to know about job losses and Brexit

Lorry drivers: get yourself down to big business HQs. You’re likely to find some work shipping their stuff out

When I started work this morning, my editor asked if I might like to try and explain Theresa May’s latest customs proposal ahead of the next “crucial” meeting of the crazy people we’ve somehow managed to elect to govern us.

The thing is, I don’t have a bloody clue how it will work. Nor does half her cabinet. Nor, I imagine, does Jaguar boss Ralph Speth, or the bosses of BMW and Airbus, or the bosses of just about every other big employer that’s rethinking the plans they had to pump billions of pounds into a Britain that used to be a rather good place in which to invest.

About the only thing I can say for sure is that it’s about as likely to fly when she presents it to the EU as the Colombian football team is to spend more than a minute on the pitch without committing some kind of foul.

Well look at that! Finally something David Davis, Michael Gove, and the other people who want to destroy the UK economy in pursuit of ideological purity, agree with Europe on.

Davis is said to have written a cross letter to the PM about the plan, and you can bet there’ll soon be a report in some Brexit-loving newspaper that he’s threatening to resign. Again.

Will that be the 67th or the 68th time he’s made such a threat? I’m not sure. It might be the 173rd. After a while you start to treat him a bit like a child denied an ice cream in the current hot weather: you tune his tantrums out.

But I have to admit, I couldn’t tune out the excitement over at the BBC.

Speth has said he’s desperate to stay in Britain but won’t be able to do so if he can’t get frictionless trade with the EU because, without it, his company stands to lose £1.2bn a year.

In the wake of his statement, the Brexit Broadcasting Corporation decided it had to come up with someone other than loopy economics prof Patrick Minford to go on the Today programme to say “they’re just bally wrong” in response to a business citing the very real, evidence-backed, concerns it has about what’s going on.

Owen Paterson was that man. For those who haven’t yet come across this creature, with so much attention being directed towards the terrible Old Etonian twins of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, he hangs out in Shropshire. That is, when he’s not trousering £8,333 a month for doing 16 hours of consultancy work for Randox Laboratories, a company from Northern Ireland that he had dealings with while serving in government.

Perhaps it’s that experience that makes him think he knows more about running Jaguar than does the chief executive of Jaguar (a point the BBC didn’t care to put to him).

Either that or he and his colleagues just don’t give a toss about what happens to the tens of thousands of people that work there.

It’s probably a bit of both.

At a time of excitement about spying and stuff, do you think it might be a good idea to check the Shropshire water for traces of LSD? I do. How else to explain voters putting an X next to his name.

Here’s the thing that Paterson and his pals deliberately decline to address: Speth, unlike the rest of us, will get a vote if the fevered dreams of the Brextremists are realised and, as seems increasingly likely, Britain crashes out of the EU without any sort of deal.

So will the bosses of Airbus, and BMW, and lots of other manufacturers who have kept quiet up until now, preferring to shelter behind those companies and their trade bodies.

It will be exercised via the use of their and their businesses’ feet. Lorry drivers: get yourself down to their HQs. You’re likely to find some work shipping their stuff out.

There are still people who say these are idle threats. They are not. It’s a bit late in the day for that. They are, in fact, warnings from companies that would prefer not to get involved in politics but feel that they now have no choice. They’d like to stay, because they have put a lot of money to work here, but they won’t be able to do that if they start losing it.

When that fact forces Jaguar and the others out, will Paterson, or Davis, or one of the other pitchfork-wielding zealots care to appear on the Today programme to tell Speth and his peers why they’re wrong for the second time?

Shame not being a part of those MPs’ make-up, it could happen.

Shame will surely be the cry from members of the Jaguar workforce as they pick up their P45s en route to their local Job Centre Plus.

Hey, here’s an idea: why doesn’t the Tory party sponsor the redundancies? Everything else is sponsored these days and it’d be quite a result for those advocating for truth in advertising.

Your P45 brought to you by the Conservative Brexit Party – we know what’s best for business! Contact our team about job opportunities at your local call centre.

What’s that, you say? That would probably break some sort of rule?

Since when did Brexiteers ever give two hoots about rules? If they’re lucky they might even be able to tap that nice Putin up for a bung to cover the cost after he’s totted up his World Cup dividend.