David Davis just told Brussels to 'learn its history' – but I think we all know the problem isn't the past

David Davis evoked Britain’s ‘reliable, dependable history,’ like a pissed stag party member storming the easyJet cockpit, punching the captain unconscious and declaring over the intercom, ‘Don’t panic, an actual pilot used to fly this thing!’

If you’re looking for your favourite Brexit-as-Pulp-Fiction moment – and frankly, why wouldn’t you be? – then David Davis going back to the same room where Theresa May was launching her leadership bid right at the moment Michael Gove simultaneously knifed Boris Johnson in the back and himself in the front and then reading out David Cameron’s 2016 referendum stump speech would have to be it.

The speech had been billed as the Brexit secretary discussing the future “security partnership” between the UK and the EU, which Davis said would be “one that recognises the history with Europe that we share”.

He said these words in the library of the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall, surrounded by, at a conservative estimate, 4.5 billion words exclusively dedicated to the subject of how the nations of Europe have blunderbussed, bayoneted, machine-gunned and generally bombed the shit out of one another over the last several hundred years.

The speech was, in its way, a work of art. Davis went on a guided tour of all the current security arrangements between the UK and the EU, and the enormous benefits they provide. He spoke at great length about the European Arrest Warrant, which had allowed the UK to “extradite the failed 21/7 bomber, Hussein Osman, from Italy”.

It was not quite deja vu, because no one was in any doubt about where they’d heard it before. They’d all heard it approximately 10,000 times before, when David Cameron said it literally every day while campaigning for Remain.

We heard of how, before the launch of the European Arrest Warrant in 2004, only “60 criminals a year” were extradited from the UK to face trial in their own country. “That number is now 10,000.”

It was as if Davis was guiding his audience around the remarkable battle scenes on some ancient Grecian urn, pointing out the beautiful carvings, the intricate wonder of it all, and somehow hoping no one would notice that the urn was in pieces on the floor, because Davis himself had just deliberately picked it up and smashed it.

One aspect of the backdrop to all this is the possible exclusion of the UK from the EU’s new Galileo satellite navigation system, a multibillion-pound project to which the UK has contributed both money and expertise. Now, it has been suggested, Britain can’t be trusted with sensitive security information.

“Anyone who suggests the UK can’t be trusted and isn’t the proven friend of every European country needs to study their history,” Davis said, in a message for his opposite numbers in Brussels, all of whom are entirely familiar at least with Britain’s very recent history, in which David Davis has shown on at least 20 occasions that he has not the faintest idea what he is talking about.

Oh, David Davis. The history isn’t the problem. No one is doubting Britain’s past role as a leading member of the European continent. For long decades – centuries, even – Britain has been the home of good and practical government, of flexibility, common sense. The problem is the present. The bit David Davis is personally responsible for.

For Davis to invoke Britain’s proud past as some kind of comfort blanket for its perilous and profoundly humiliating present is the kind of magnificent bravado of which possibly only he is capable. It is like a pissed stag party member storming the easyJet cockpit, punching the captain unconscious and declaring over the intercom, “Don’t panic, everything will be fine! An actual pilot used to fly this thing!”

Still, his final words were clear enough: “When Britain loses, Europe loses too,” he said. Which is, of course, precisely what Donald Tusk, Jean Claude Juncker, Michel Barnier and absolutely everyone in Brussels has been saying for more than two years, because that is the inevitable, unavoidable end state of Brexit.

And yet it still appears to be a lesson that Davis the Great Historian will have to wait to learn in the present, at some point very soon after March 2019, when it will be even more far too late than it already is.