David Davis is too busy for select committees, too busy for Brussels and frankly too busy for Brexit

As the Select Committee found out, ask the Brexit secretary an A or B question and you will get a 'yes'

Ever since David Davis was accused by former Vote Leave chief Dominic Cummings of being “lazy as a toad”, he has made a commendable effort to fill his day by stating how busy he is, in a manner not wholly dissimilar to a well-known Micky Flanagan comedy routine.

The newly can’t-stop-double-busy Brexit Secretary likes to tweet pictures of himself on his way to meetings everywhere from Lisbon to Latvia, at no point showing any awareness of the famous business rule that there is no surer sign of indolence than a man who offers his travel schedule as evidence of his own industry.

He also can no longer appear before the Brexit Select Committee without first stating how quickly he must leave it again. For the second time running, on Wednesday morning, events began with Davis telling them he could only spare them 90 minutes as he had better things to do with his time.

“Sorry Hilary, can’t stop, double busy, proper double busy, meeting at ten, breakfast at two, call at six, working lunch tonight. You know how it is. Proper double busy,” he may or may not have said.

After having first made clear how much he didn’t want to be there, the Brexit secretary carried on treating events with the kind of disdain that only he can. He’d been made a fool of once before, for sitting down at a meeting with negotiators in Brussels, totally devoid of any notes whatsoever, while his counterparts had vast ring-binders. That mistake would not be made again.

In front of him was a large red ring binder, carefully divided into around forty separate sub-sections. He placed it down in front of him, opened it, and for the following 100 minutes turned not a single page on any occasion.

It was recently said of Oscar-nominated movie The Post that the Best Supporting Actor gong should have gone to Andy Serkis for his performance as Meryl Streep’s glasses. They have nothing on Davis’s. Approximately every eight seconds they moved in rotation from nose to hand to table to gob like some kind of demented high speed country dance.

Somewhere or other, in Tom Hodgkinson’s seminal work, How to Be Idle (I couldn’t be bothered to find exactly where), I vaguely think there is some line or other about how sometimes what looks like the easy option can actually lead to more work.

And to give David “lazy as a toad” Davis credit, it is a lesson he has learnt the hard way.

Once upon a time, when faced with a difficult question, such as, “Has your department done any work at all to evaluate the potential impact of Brexit?”, he would answer along the lines of, “Yes it has” – even though it blatantly hadn’t – and think that was the smart way out of a difficult bind.

But as he and the rest of us now know, that course of action ends with his then having to prevaricate for six weeks while his entire department frantically copy and pastes Wikipedia on to Dexeu notepaper in an attempt to create the work David Davis had invented.

He has now worked out it’s far easier to keep things nice and vague. Commit to anything at all and, well, there’s a chance you might actually have to do something.

Mercifully for him, Brexit, and the Northern Ireland border question in particular, is delightfully complex. It is rare, in this world of harmonisation and regulatory alignment and a customs unions and the customs union and so on, for Davis to be asked a yes/no question. Instead, he is asked “Is it A or B?” To which he likes to reply: “Yes or no.”

The first question put to him was what would happen with the Northern Irish border, now that the EU had set out in great detail why all of the UK’s proposals for a “technological border” were not workable.

He described this as “their opening position” and this was there to be negotiated. Of the UK’s own plans for a technological solution he said, “Most of the technology already exists.” This, then, is the UK’s opening position. The technology that doesn’t exist can be negotiated into existence.

It was roughly at this point that the hard border returned between Davis and reality. It is disappointing always to have to remember that this, the most important issue to face the UK in generations, has been left in the hands of a man who is best understood as a YouTuber parody of an 1980s businessman. The type of person that had wrongly been imagined left on the roadside towards progress around a decade ago, but who came roaring back into fashion, both here and in America, in 2016.

Stephen Kinnock tried to make ground on Labour’s current rouse, which is to seek to amend the final “meaningful vote” on the Brexit deal, expected in October, to give parliament the power to force David Davis back to Brussels for more negotiations, and eventually, perhaps a second referendum.

Could David Davis be sent back to Brussels if his deal was not approved by parliament? Maybe David Davis could, maybe David Davis couldn't, said David Davis.

“The first responsibility of government is to promote and defend the national interest,” he said. “One national interest is to not incentivise the other side. That is why I have said no to a second referendum that would create an incentive on the other side to offer us a bad deal.”

Perhaps it is a consequence of David Davis having to live in the inner world of David Davis that makes it so hard for him to see that not everyone is like David Davis. Put this hypothesis before anyone in Brussels – that a second referendum on the terms of Brexit would incentivise them to offer us a bad deal – and you always get a variation on the same answer: that a bad deal for the UK is a bad deal for them too.

They are not in the business of taking such wild, reckless gambles with their own people’s future and prosperity. That, after all, would be stupid and deeply irresponsible.

This point might even have been vaguely put to him, but by that point the spectacles had been gathered from the untouched ring binder, the ring binder was then closed, and Davis was off to find something more important to do.