David Davis is a good man and a solid politician who was finally able to recognise that the Brexit game is up

Theresa May brought Davis back from the political dead along with Liam Fox and Boris Johnson. She gave her Three Musketeers much time and space to see if they could deliver Brexit, but the results speak for themselves

I am sorry David Davis has resigned. He will be 70 this year and has been in parliament since 1987.

I found him open, straight, with a great sense of humour and mischief. Unlike many of the swivel-eyed anti-European fanatics Davis, has a calm, middle-England objection to the sharing of sovereignty with other nations and the fact that the Commons was no longer the only source of law in his country.

He was John Major’s Europe minister when I was elected an MP in 1994, and was sent straight into battle on issues European by Tony Blair.

It was a rotten time for any Tory minister, but to be minister for Europe was parliamentary hell on earth. Major’s failure to stand up to Michael Howard, Iain Duncan Smith and other obsessive anti-Europeans gave Blair open goal after open goal.

The height of absurdity was when Major responded to countries in Europe suspending imports of British beef after the mad cow outbreak by threatening to block all EU business, and veto any new decisions.

No one had told Major that his predecessor, Margaret Thatcher, had abolished national vetoes in key areas, so the rest of Europe ignored a petulant Downing Street and continued as normal.

To represent the UK as David Davis had to do in the dying years of a failing Major government was no fun at all.

But he remained cheerful and there was always a smile on his face as he was teased at the despatch box at the Tory inability to get anything right on Europe.

Like most Eurosceptic politicians, he has no foreign languages and presumably gets a fair bit of his information from The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, which are not the most reliable sources on EU reality.

His two decades in the political wilderness after 1997 might have been spent learning French or getting to know more about the EU. But Davis is above all an English parliamentarian, and a House of Commons man. He has written a book on the Commons. In 2008 he resigned quixotically as home secretary to hold a stunt by-election to protest Labour’s hardline reaction on detention of suspected Islamist terrorist suspects.

I went past St Stephen’s entrance as Davis was giving his news conference about his resignation, as the speaker had refused him the right to make a statement in the Commons. I said Labour should ignore the by-election, and Davis came back into the Commons having achieved nothing except to give David Cameron a good excuse to sack him as shadow home secretary and end the career of the man who nearly beat him to the leadership of the Tory Party.

It was Theresa May who brought back Davis from the political dead along with Liam Fox and Boris Johnson. She gave her Three Musketeers of Brexit much time and space to see if they could deliver Brexit.

The results speak for themselves. Davis spent just four hours this year negotiating with Barnier. Fox has been unable to get any kind of serious trade offer. Johnson has just resigned – and is widely derided as the worst foreign secretary in living memory

At the Hay Festival in May, I spoke to Davis and put to him my thesis (advanced in a book published last year) that short of a new referendum the UK would leave the EU Treaty next spring. We would negotiate trade arrangements to keep access for goods and services. So we would be politically out, economically in and there would be partnership arrangements on police, security intelligence, sanctions, Iran, Trump and the environment. Davis thought a moment: “Yup. That’s about right,” he told me.

At that moment I knew that this serious man knew the Brexit game was up. He could limp on miserably as May nudged the UK to a relationship with Europe that avoided the catastrophic economic damage of the full amputational Brexit urged by the Europe-hating fanatics.

Davis likes his country. He has done Wainwright’s coast-to-coast walk fifteen times. Once I went walking in the Lake District with him and other MPs under the gentle guidance of Chris Bonington. Davis turned up with his GPS, a map folder, heavy duty anorak and boots, and a flask full of vegetable soup. It was the perfect Englishman on parade for a bracing hill walk.

When I got into disastrous trouble over my expenses when the parliamentary authorities decided to uphold a BNP complaint, even after I had been cleared by the Metropolitan Police and the CPS (I was utterly at fault) and I had to quit the Commons, it was the blackest day in my life.

As I walked through Portcullis House for the last time, MP friends averted their eyes from this outcast. David Davis got up, came over to me, and in front of everyone gave me a huge bear hug.

He is a good man. A loyal Tory. He famously said: “A democracy that cannot change its mind ceases to be a democracy.” One can sense Britain changing its mind on Brexit. Whether Davis can change his mind or whether he will stay in his anti-European trench remains to be seen.

But as someone utterly opposed to his line on Europe over 25 years, I salute a big serious politician, a solid parliamentarian, and utterly different from the xenophobes and the Ukip fellow travellers in parliament and government.