You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for David Davis – he is trying his best at being absolutely awful at his job

Barely a year before the scheduled exit date, the ship of state sails serenely on while the senior crew inform the passengers that what may look like an iceberg is in fact a wormhole to paradise

The longer this waking nightmare drags on, the harder it becomes not to warm, a little, to David Davis. As the Brexit Secretary flails about in the frothing waters of his cluelessness – not waving, not drowning, just grinning blankly in a heroically misguided effort to project confidence – familiarity breeds grudging affection.

If our future is in his hands, this may be what Stockholm syndrome would feel like if your captor was on secondment from the provisional Keystone Kops wing of Baader Meinhoff.

Davis’s latest madcap attempt at reassuring us has been the highlight so far in the scintillating sequence of top level Cabinet speeches being officially marketed as “The Road to Brexit”.

That styling might remind some of Talking Heads single “Road to Nowhere”. But in the wake of Boris Johnson’s keynote bletherfest of last week, and with tours de forces from Liam Fox and Michael Gove to follow, I reckon it’s shaping into the movie franchise’s most entertaining instalment since 1946’s Road to Utopia, in which Bing Crosby and Bob Hope chance upon a hidden goldmine on their way to Alaska.

Davis preferred to reference a different kind of road movie in today’s speech to business leaders today. Any fears that the Tories will plunge Britain into a post-Brexit “Mad Max-style world borrowed from dystopian fiction” are, he insisted, entirely baseless.

As reassurance goes, it went badly. Until he plucked that filmic image, it never occurred to me that this was a possibility. Now that he’s implanted it, the spectre of a future spent wandering through a superheated desert, being hunted down by biker gangs and addressed as “sugar tits” by Mel Gibson, will be impossible to escape.

Davis has produced the equivalent of going to the GP about a nagging abdominal pain, and being told it isn’t an aortic aneurism.

“But I never thought it was, doctor. I was a bit concerned about a hernia, or maybe diverticulitis, but I hadn’t considered it could be a potentially fatal problem.”

“Good, good, because it almost certainly isn’t.”

“Almost?”

“Yeah. Highly unlikely.”

“So why the hell did you mention it?”

“Well, I know you’re a bit of a worrier, and I didn’t want you to fret.”

How would any self-respecting hypochondriac react to that other than by stumbling home in blind terror, and passing the next 17 hours gulping whisky and staring in panic at the symptoms on the internet?

God knows what made him refer to Mad Max. But if it was a subconscious fantasy about Tina Turner in Beyond Thunderdome, no one will be more tempted to serenade him with her biggest hit after this speech, with its vacuous portrayal of the post-Brexit vista as “a race to the top”, than before.

If anyone is singing that one right now, it’s Davis himself. His conviction that Brexit will magically restore some mystical brand of innate British superiority is modelled on David Brent’s appearance as a motivational speaker; the one where he played “Simply The Best” to an incredulous audience while cackling like a hyena on nitrous.

Harsh critics might posit that on its own, the act of telling us we’re going to be better than all the rest isn’t quite as cheering as he appears to believe; that some well researched, detailed analysis would be awfully nice as well.

Then again, one appreciates that he’s an extremely busy man. What with commandeering RAF flights, gazing yearningly at his map of 18th century Europe, and getting in a frightful muddle about whether there are any economic impact assessment papers (let alone what they might predict), he hasn’t had two seconds to formulate any coherent argument as to why Brexit will make us better than anyone foreign we ever met.

Neither has Boris, his sidekick in this curious remake of Dumb and Dumber. Nor has the third of the Stooges, Dr Fox. Nor has Michael Gove, who will also be treating us to his vision before long. Twenty months after the referendum, barely a year before the scheduled exit date, the ship of state sails serenely on while the senior crew inform the passengers that what may look like an iceberg is in fact a wormhole to paradise.

Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps the imminent Brexit Cabinet meeting at Chequers – the most pivotal, apparently, since Churchill did Gary Oldman such a favour by persuading the War Cabinet to continue the fight against Hitler in May, 1940 – will break the ice. Perhaps we will chance upon a goldmine on the road to utopia.

But if not, under no circumstances blame a Brexit Secretary who has lowered expectations to the point where you want to punch the air and do a lap of honour round the garden if he turns up to the right meeting on the right day with the right bundle of (doubtless unread) papers in his arms.

Davis may or may not be “thick as mince, lazy as a toad, and vain as Narcissus”, as the combative Dominic Cummings put it. He might work a three-day week, as his ex-chief of staff James Chapman claims, and have the chilled-out entertainer’s preference for a few drinks over reading reports.

But the same went for another tragicomically hapless victim of bewildering over-promotion whose lingua franca was utterly vacuous jargon – and ultimately you needed a heart of diamond-coated tungsten not to root, a little, for the Brentmeister General.