Liam Fox's imperialist arrogance will help to make Brexit the most difficult thing in human history

While you needn’t be a theological obsessive to believe in the power of redemption, Fox is one nationalistic neo-con chancer who seems to demand the widest of berths

If a politician can have a day named after him for tweeting “Ed Balls”, it is a scandal that Liam Fox still hasn’t been given one of his own.

Apologies if he has. I was abroad on July 22, and may have missed the street parties rocking it for Liam Fox Day. But if not, let’s start a petition calling for it to be inaugurated next year, on the second anniversary of Fox revealing that cutting a Brexit deal should be “the easiest thing in human history”.

A touch more than 12 months on, the Nostradamus of International Trade has had a rethink. Admittedly, it’s almost too minor to mention. But for the record, Fox now reckons it’s a 60-40 chance that the easiest deal ever will end up as no deal at all.

When Bank of England guv’nor Mark Carney made the same point on Friday, albeit with the vaguer calculation that the chances are “uncomfortably high”, he was savaged by Brexit ultras for scaremongering.

Why none of Fox’s confreres have dismissed his warning with similar disdain is hard to call. Maybe it’s because, where Carney avoided apportioning any blame, he brilliantly identifies the catalyst for the easiest deal-no-deal metamorphosis as the “intransigence” of those beastly Europeans.

“If the EU decides the theological obsession of the unelected is to take priority over the economic wellbeing of the people of Europe … ” he tells the The Sunday Times, “then there is only going to be one outcome.” Yeah, yeah, big boy, that’ll scare ’em.

As usual with extremists at both ends of the political spectrum, the diagnosis here is projection (or, to use language even Iain Duncan Smith might understand: “He who smelt it dealt it”).

If in Fox’s GP days, a patient with a stuffed parrot on the shoulder had hobbled into his surgery on a fake wooden leg, shrieking “Arrghhh, Jim lad!” and demanding diazepam for anxiety caused by the neighbour noisily confusing himself with Long John Silver, the good doctor would have referred him for psychiatric evaluation.

Yet, here we find him giving as blatant a display of projection as any since Trump last roused his QAnon T-shirt-wearing faithful by accusing CNN of making stuff up.

All the theological obsessiveness here belongs to Fox and those others you might call the suicide bombers of Brexit if they – Boris, David Davis, Andrea Leadsom, IDS, Bernard Jenkin, etc – weren’t sufficiently insulated by personal wealth to survive a no-deal explosion.

I reluctantly exclude Michael Gove from the list, despite David Cameron’s nuanced description of him as “a lunatic”, only because he is feigning sanity for now with a compromise candidate leadership bid in mind.

Both collectively and (as Theresa May learned from her courteous crushing at Emmanuel Macron’s hands) individually, the EU states are wholly pragmatic. They’d prefer a deal, obviously. But if the lethal ultra cocktail of religious fanaticism and imperialist arrogance makes one impossible, they’ll endure the pain with relative ease.

If Britain is well placed to do the same, it would be spiffing to have that confirmed by the release of the weekly no-deal contingency planning reports the government prefers to keep to itself.

Liam Fox, on the other hand, is someone many want to keep to himself. There are few social situations you’d want to share with someone whose achievements include enchanting a Christmas party with the riddle: “What do you call four dogs and a blackbird? The Spice Girls” (boom!); being resigned as defence secretary for taking BFF Adam Werrity to weaponry meetings across the globe; and being so careless with expenses claims that he had to repay more than anyone else in Cameron’s shadow cabinet.

While you needn’t be a theological obsessive to believe in the power of redemption, this is one nationalistic neo-con chancer who seems to demand the widest of berths.

The one milieu in which I’d like to meet Fox is at the poker table. “I think it’s essential,” he insists, “that no deal looks credible to the EU.” His tell is barely less impenetrable than Le Chiffre’s in Casino Royale, who alerted 007 to a bluff by weeping blood; Fox’s lips move.

If this game of chicken does reach the abyss, as anyone capable of registering brainwaves during an EEG must know, only one side will be tempted to blink. And it won’t be Michel Barnier’s.

The quantum of solace from his interview is that it may marginally shorten the odds against a second referendum. God love Fox for a poor deluded child if he thinks such a crude, pitiful threat will loosen bowels in Brussels. Its only effect is to petrify us even more with a reminder of the quality of those tasked with orchestrating the most difficult extraction in human history.

Every war is about choosing between the lesser of evils, as Orwell said, and that includes a low level civil war like the one certain to rumble on here for a generation, however this disaster story pans out.

In the absence of any other viable method of releasing the pressure cooker valve, with the parliamentary numbers deadlocked and catastrophe opening its arms, that choice becomes crystallised. It lies between cancelling Brexit – a national humiliation to reduce Suez to a burp at a royal garden party – and the cataclysmic outcome Mark Carney so delicately euphemised as “highly undesirable”.

With food shortages on one side of the table, it must seem basic good manners to all but the religious maniac to offer a gargantuan helping of humble pie instead.

One of these days, who knows, perhaps one of the ultras will be honourable enough (hahahahaha) to acknowledge that the popular will must be tested again before this lemming government drags us all over the cliff edge.

If by some minor miracle it fell to Fox to do the decent thing, he might even become the first person in human history to have not one, but two annual days named after him.