There is at least one thing on which the UK and the EU agree, and that is never to listen to David Davis

The Brexit Secretary consistently deploys a trick weapon when asked a difficult question – rather than attempting to answer it, he laughs

David Davis laughed away the serious questions on Brexit, as only he can (AP)

I began typing this out at 3pm, seconds after David Davis finished giving evidence to the European Scrutiny Committee, so if it’s gone half five now and you’ve only just started reading then frankly I wouldn’t bother.

It’s now a well established fact that the Brexit Secretary’s words keep about as well as a bowl of prawns stored by accident in an airing cupboard. So if you still want to approach them after the two hour mark, then you do so at your own risk.

In fact, to line up all of David Davis’s previous utterances on his favourite topic of Brexit is briefly to become one of those “body farms” occasionally featured in bizarre documentaries, where scientists store decomposing human remains in holes in the ground for fifty years or more, occasionally taking them out to record the hideous transfigurations that have been visited on upon them.

Excavate some of Davis’s statements from before the referendum now and so terrifying have they become it takes a giant leap of imagination ever to imagine them having emerged alive from his permanently chuckling gob. The bilateral trade deal with the German car industry that was going to be signed on June 24th 2016 – that kind of thing.

On Tuesday afternoon we had more of the same. His interrogator was not so tough. There are two Brexit select committees you see. There is the Exiting the European Select Committee, chaired by Hilary Benn, which is best understood as the Remain Committee. And then there is the European Scrutiny Committee led, for something like the last one hundred thousand years by Sir Bill Cash. According to the Mohs scale of hardness, diamond is the hardest substance on earth, but scientists are rumoured to be considering downgrading it to make room at the top for the kind of Brexit Sir Bill Cash desperately wants.

It was the former Vote Leave chief Dominic Cummings who said: “The Eurosceptic world is a very old world populated by very odd people. Gener­ally, not always but generally, the longer they have been involved in it, the higher the probability that they will be odd.”

On a personal note, it was not so long ago that I was watching Sir Bill Cash tell the House of Commons for around the hundredth time that Britain’s war dead died for Brexit, when an entirely unrelated Whatsapp message arrived from a friend. He had had to go home from work because his young son had been sent home from play group for taking his trousers down, colouring his penis blue with a felt tip and shouting abuse at anyone that tried to come near him. Since that time I confess I have not been able to shake from my mind the fear that if for whatever reason Brexit doesn’t happen, Sir Bill Cash may very well do exactly that.

I digress. We are almost two weeks away from the point at which a deal on the UK’s transitional arrangements with the EU have to be signed at an EU summit. Two weeks. Mr Davis was asked where there were outstanding areas of disagreement. Naturally, he laughed and said he “couldn’t remember them all” but could provide a list later.

He was asked about what appears to be the UK’s ongoing commitment to “cherry-picking”, which is to say wanting to remain part of some aspects of EU life but not others, a reality the EU has been utterly unflinchingly brazenly unswervingly relentlessly singularly devoted to carry on saying at all times without hesitation or deviation definitely isn’t going to happen.

“Ah cherry-picking,” Davis replied. “I’ve teased them back about that, ha ha ha.”

Such a consistently deployed weapon in the Davis armoury is this trick – though the word trick flatters – of laughing at difficult questions rather than attempting to answer them it has almost become unsettling to listen to. So often is Davis the only person in the room laughing, he has almost come to represent some curious character from an ITV psycho-thriller.

“Why was she seen coming out of your house, Mr Davis?”

“Ha ha ha ha.”

“You were either there at the night of the murder or you were not, Mr Davis?”

“Ha ha ha ha.”

“Why were your fingerprints found on the knife, Mr Davis?”

“Ha ha ha ha.”

“We have reached a verdict your honour. We find the defendant guilty.”

“Ha ha ha ha.”

“I sentence you to life imprisonment Mr Davis, with no opportunity for parole.”

“Ha ha ha ha. Wait, what?”

Whenever that “list of areas of disagreement” arrives in Bill Cash’s office, there is certain that one thing won’t be on it. There is absolutely no one left in disagreement with the notion that you really never need listen to a word David Davis says, ever again.