Enter Dominic Raab, a veritable chip off the old Brexit block

There is no sincerer form of flattery. It had been expected that the appointment of Dominic Raab to replace David Davis as Brexit secretary might raise the average IQ of the department by a few dozen points. After all, even appointing my dog – one of the dimmer creatures on this planet – would have been an improvement. But these hopes have been quickly dashed. Either there is something about the Brexit department that renders all ministers who work for it catatonically stupid or Raab is determined to live down to the standards of his predecessor. An act of kindness.

What Raab does have, however, that Davis doesn’t, is a limited amount of self-awareness. He realises that the whole purpose of his job is that it’s entirely cosmetic. He’s not there to actually do anything. He’s there to give the impression that he’s doing something. The Brexit negotiations are far too complex to be left to any of the halfwits in the Brexit department. They’re also way too tricky for the prime minister and the civil service, but it’s they who are calling the shots and Raab’s main function is to do the photocopying and make the tea. Jobs he can just about manage.

At his first departmental questions, Raab immediately set about proving his lack of credentials by declaring he was very much looking forward to Michel Barnier offering “his full support” for the Chequers white paper when they met later in the day. A curious reading of the situation, given that the other EU countries have been openly sniggering about the white paper’s faults for much of the past few days and were under the impression they were currently still negotiating the withdrawal agreement. Raab hadn’t got to where he had today by knowing what he was doing. Or what was going on. The ghost of Davis past.

The general sense of futility around Brexit is catching. When Hilary Benn first became chair of the Brexit select committee, his questions to ministers in the Commons came with bite. A sense of real anger that the government was failing in its duty to the country. Now they come with the weary resignation of a man who knows he is an eyewitness to an ongoing major pile-up but is powerless to prevent it. Would the minister care to talk through how he was going to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland, Benn sighed, more in hope than expectation. Not really, Raab shrugged. It would be fine because it would be fine because it would be fine. That’s about as far as anyone in government has really got. It was the same with the services sector. The reason no one had got around to thinking about it was because it was only 80% of the economy so it wasn’t that important.

The shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, felt obliged to try a couple of questions on the viability of the Chequers agreement but he, too, was sweet-talked with meaningless circular arguments that went nowhere. A world of magical realism where everything could be simultaneously exactly the same and entirely different. Here and not here. Where there would be a Brexit dividend even if the country was worse off because being worse off was a price worth paying for taking back control.

It wasn’t just Labour that was getting fobbed off. Several of the hardcore Tory Eurosceptics were keen to make sure ministers were making detailed plans for their preferred no-deal Brexit. Absolutely, Raab insisted. The department had started thinking about it very hard a few days previously and had already come up with some nicely coloured wall charts he hoped would be made available to the public at some point in the future when it would all be a bit late. But it would still all be fine even if it wasn’t.

At this point, Steve Baker, the former junior Brexit minister who had been Private Walker to Davis’s Captain Mainwaring and is now a self-appointed cheerleader for Boris Johnson, intervened to ask if his one-page masterplan – MY MASTERPLAN by S. BAKER. 1. Tell the EU to sod off. 2. Take back control 3. So there. 4. Panic – could be widely distributed around the department. Are you sure? Raab said. Wouldn’t it be less embarrassing if it was quietly fed through the shredder?

Baker wasn’t satisfied. It’s not enough for him to be thought an idiot. He won’t rest until he’s proved it. So he carried on, demanding also that the minister appoint a tame economist to rubbish the HMRC report that warned even a soft Brexit would cost the country jobs and money. Raab said nothing. It didn’t feel the time to point out Brexit had already cost Baker his job and there was every chance it would claim those of several more ministers. The sooner the better. For their sake as well as the country’s.