David Davis has a plan for Brexit: the worse it gets the more he'll grin

Never mind the experts, never mind the facts, just talk like it's a game of Trivial Pursuit, and smile like you know best

The more serious Brexit gets, the harder the Brexit Secretary grins

It is a well known rule in public life that the vitriol with which a person attacks any particular vice rises in perfect proportion to the depth of their private yearning for it. Check the browser history of a gay-bashing Catholic priest and you’ll almost certainly find it’s been emptied in the last five minutes.

As such we should not be surprised that expert-loathing Michael Gove should find it impossible to raise the fact that Labour’s Shadow Brexit Secretary Keir Starmer ‘spoke for forty minutes’ without contextualising that otherwise unimaginable timespan as 'longer than many Pinter plays or Haydn symphonies.’

Take that IMF. Have that CBI. And Nato. And all the rest of you, with your acronyms and your expertise. Look how much little old Michael Gove knows. I don’t know if you know but I used to have a newspaper column. Actually, I still do have a newspaper column. They gave it back to me when I tried and failed to become Prime Minister.

There is no surer sign of the lightness of intellect than the heaviness with which it is worn.

Of course, you could argue, on the basis of it being true, that the whole Brexit debate has been characterised by the brave rising up of those who don’t know what they’re talking about against those who do. And as such, Michael Gove is a fine prism through which to see it. Mr Gove, of course, recently held the position of Lord Chancellor, the highest legal post in the land, entirely unencumbered with any formal legal knowledge or training. And that in itself provided excellent training for the afternoon's task at hand, namely dismissing Mr Starmer’s lengthy dissection of the approach taken by the government to parliament on the matter of Brexit, an approach which has taken the intervention of no more towering a figure than a Portuguese hairdresser to land the government in the Supreme Court.

It was Mr Starmer, who just so happens to be the former Director of Public Prosecution and thus blessed (or cursed) with at least a smattering of formal legal knowledge, who had brought the motion that was up for debate: namely that the government must lay out its plans for Brexit to parliament. But added to it was a crafty Conservative amendment that meant the motion could only pass if it was also agreed that Article 50 must be triggered by the end of March. Obviously, all of it was non-binding, but rarely do tedious facts get in the way round here.

The tall, talented but occasionally hesitant Mr Starmer called for an end to, “the characterising of questioning the government’s approach as seeking to frustrate Brexit.”

What we had, according to Mr Gove, 'was forty minutes of pious vapouring, a hole in the air masquerading as an argument.' One day, Mr Gove will realise that the real world is not a grand extension out the back of the Oxford Union. Today was not that day.

Opposite Starmer sat the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, who grinned from start to finish as though his life depended on it. Davis has been a swaggering, bragging mutation of his own self love since the very moment Theresa May returned him to the cabinet and made him the front man for the ongoing detonation of his country’s dignity.

Be it narcissistic personality disorder, the Messiah complex, or simply world record shattering smugness, the Brexit Secretary has not yet been abused of the notion that the most important element in any human occasion at which he happens to be present is his current opinion of it, and that this opinion must be expressed through his own uniquely narrow range of incredulous laughs, sycophantic smiles and I-know-best eye rolls.

But those who disagree with Mr Davis, or even wish him to set out the government's intentions as it withdraws us from the European Union are, in fact, a frustration. “The Government must have the flexibility to adjust during negotiations,” he said. “It is like threading the eye of a needle: if you have a good eye and a steady hand, it is easy enough, but if somebody jogs your elbow, it is harder. If 650 people jog your elbow, it is very much harder.”

It is like thinking that complex negotiations involving 28 separate member nations with competing interests is anything like threading a needle. It is like trying to come up with a clever simile that makes perfect sense and accidentally going skiing with a crayon.

Still, it didn’t matter. Nothing was going to break the will of The Grin That Knows Best. If Davis thinks there’s a chance you might know more than him, he’ll just grin even harder. That way he wins. And never was it harder than when another actual lawyer, the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, had the temerity to stand up.

Mr Grieve is MP for Beaconsfield, a Conservative seat that voted narrowly for remain. He sees his job now, he said, as seeking to implement Brexit in the most successful way possible. But there are, in his view challenges, which are hard not to quote at length:

“The difficulty, as I see it, is that what we have heard over the last two months in particular—the vitriolic abuse, the polemical argument without any substance, and the ignorance of some of the basic ABC of our constitution—has reached a point at which I sit in the Chamber and listen to utterances that border on the completely paranoid.

“The nadir, for me, was to sit one evening and hear a Minister of the Crown say that one of the Queen’s subjects who was seeking to assert her legal rights in the Queen’s courts, and who was, I might add, subjected to death threats as a result, was doing something, or had achieved something, that was unacceptable. If we continue like this, we are on the road to a very bad place.

“This is the kind of issue in debate we have got to start to sort out, because the public out there expect us at least to have some degree of expertise about what we are actually trying to do, and to go and explain it, against the background of vitriolic abuse against anybody who is prepared to raise their voice to put forward any argument that appears to be counter to the fantastical vision some have created out of our leaving the EU.”

We live in serious times. And if you’re ever in any doubt about that, just check to see how hard David Davis is laughing about it.