Brexit has turned the country's politicians into Mr and Mrs Twit, and we're all about to get the shrinks

A random member of the public turned up in the House of Commons claiming to be the Brexit Secretary, then things went downhill

In the ancient democracy of Athens, executive positions were allocated by lot and held for a single day, so could it perhaps be the case that, two and half millennia later, the UK is not descending into chaos but rising to an altogether loftier ideal?

I ask this because, on Thursday morning, an entirely random member of the public turned up at the despatch box of the House of Commons claiming to be the Brexit Secretary.

His name, we were told, was Stephen Barclay. And much to the credit of Labour’s Hilary Benn and various others they got on with this otherwise routine session of Questions to the Secretary of State for Exiting The European Union as if it were all perfectly normal.

It hardly bears repeating that the session took place in a short break about halfway through a five day debate on Theresa May’s Brexit deal, which MPs have been quite rightly told many times is likely to be the most important vote they will ever cast. In these fully auto-satirical times, why shouldn’t such proceedings contain a break in order to welcome an entirely new Secretary of State for Brexit into his position? And why shouldn’t that Secretary of State for Brexit be the kind of chap that would be entirely unrecognisable on his own street?

Seema Malhotra welcomed the new Secretary of State to his new role. So did Hilary Benn. In fact, it turns out, he’s been in the job for at least three days. Because on Monday, apparently, he appeared before Hilary Benn’s Brexit Select Committee, where he’d claimed that the UK will “definitely” be leaving the European Union “on the 31st March 2019.”

That will have come as news to the emergency Big Ben bongers currently booked for the 29th, but in Mr Barclay’s defence, becoming Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union and accidentally Keeping Britain in the European Union for only two extra days isn’t a bad record.

Indeed, Britain’s membership of the European Union tends to increase in direct proportion to the amount of time spent negotiating our exit from it. David Davis spent two years doing it, and by the time he quit he’d secured an “implementation period”, to be tacked on to the end of the negotiating period of almost identical length.

Perhaps that’s how things are meant to work these days. Chris Grayling, for example, appears to be unsackable from his role as Secretary of State for Transport, a direct reward for his unswerving devotion to making sure there isn’t any.

Still, in his short time in the job, it was clear Barclay has been busy learning from the best. Did he agree, he was asked, with the Treasury and Bank of England analysis that indicates that every single scenario via which the UK leaves the European Union leaves it poorer than if it had remained?

“It is a misreading to say it involves everyone being poorer,” he said, in an eerily accurate rendition of one of Theresa May’s favourite lines. Because they’re only scenarios, you see, and who can know what the future holds? It’s fine to flush a hundred grand down the toilet because who’s to say you won’t win the lottery in the next ten years?

Hours earlier, Theresa May herself had been on the radio, making clear she was “focused on” winning the vote next Tuesday which she seemed to consider an acceptable justification for refusing to talk about what happens when she absolutely definitely loses it.

All of which was suitable preparation for the recommencement over the great Brexit debate that occurred shortly after Mr Barclay made his way back to the Dexeu Department, and waited in reception for someone to come down and sign him in.

We are now well and truly at the stage of Brexit where the country’s political class have come back from the shops like Mr and Mrs Twit to find everything in the house turned upside down and glued to the ceiling and so stand on their heads to try and fit in.

At one point, on Thursday afternoon, John McDonnell claimed that Theresa May’s Brexit deal and its backstop for northern Ireland “is a threat to our union.” This from a chap who last month gave a speech to a room full of journalists in which he said he “longed for a united Ireland.”

And of course, special mention must be made of David Davis himself, who again stood to gravely warn of the dangers of the deal, a superior alternative to which he he himself had entirely failed to negotiate before resigning.

Someone from the SNP was curious to know just how seriously we should take Mr Davis’s analysis, given that, in the buildup to the 2016 referendum, he had claimed that the first job of the UK’s Brexit negotiator would be to fly to Berlin to do a free trade deal with the German car industry.

He made this entirely legally impossible claim in May 2016,, entirely unprompted, in a deranged thread of tweets which are still publicly available. None of which stopped him first laughing, then replying by describing the comments as “a single line in speech” and adding, “So if he’s going to quote me he should at least get it right.”

That the comments weren’t from a speech, and had been quoted entirely accurately might be a matter for a less mad time, which, at present, seems a very very long way off indeed.

The next scheduled questions for the Brexit Secretary are currently scheduled for January 24 2019. Whoever turns up for that one is absolutely anybody’s guess.