Sketch: For a man said to be lazy, David Davis shows extraordinary commitment to ensuring he is never taken seriously

On Saturday, Angela Merkel told Theresa May she was still “curious” about exactly what Britain wanted from Brexit. So she for one will have been especially grateful for the clarifying certainties provided by David Davis’s decision to a) confirm without any prompting whatsoever that Brexit was not about turning Britain into a Mad Max movie and then b) fly to Austria to give a speech mainly about the robot lawnmower in his back garden.

It’s possible that Angela Merkel somehow allowed herself to become confused by absolutely every public comment made by every single prominent Brexiteer in the country over the last 40 years. That Brexit was Britain’s chance to free itself from overbearing Brussels regulation. To cut itself free from Brussels red tape.

In fact, it turns out, that Brexit is not about liberating Britain from regulation at all. It is instead, Davis informed "not an Anglo Saxon race to the bottom" but instead Britain’s chance to lead “a race to the top on standards”.

We now know that when, for example, Boris Johnson spent much of the referendum campaign promising a future in which eight-year-olds could again blow up balloons, teabags could be recycled, and smoked salmon could be sold in packets that were not marked “may contain fish”, what we in fact saw were the first stages of descent to a dystopian world, which might look nice but ends with getting pushed in front of a truck by an entirely leather-clad Mel Gibson.

It’s possible Angela Merkel was for some mystifying reason paying attention when, in January of last year the Chancellor Philip Hammond gave an interview to a German newspaper, in which he was happy to threaten that Britain would be prepared to “change its economic model” into that of a low regulation corporate tax haven if the EU didn’t give it what it wanted.

But now, suddenly on Tuesday morning, Brexit had become Britain’s chance to drive up global standards, all on its own. “These fears about a race to the bottom are based on nothing,” Davis told his Austrian audience, “not history, not intention nor interest.”

And nor, we must presume, the on-the-record quotes given to a German newspaper by the Chancellor of the Exchequer barely 12 months ago.

The conclusion we must draw from all this is that poor Ms Merkel is still stuck in what we in the UK recognise as “Phase One” of Brexit, which is to say the phase in which you are still vaguely compelled to treat with any seriousness whatsoever anything at all the Brexit Secretary ever says.

If anything it’s unfair on him. David Davis can barely go a week without someone in his department briefing some newspaper or other on his exceptional idleness. Such people are overlooking the sheer effort he has put in to ensure he is never taken seriously.

I won’t trot through the greatest hits yet again, the whole after Brexit, Britain will do free trade deals with Germany and France, and then join a free trade zone larger than Planet Earth stuff. It’s boring.

What is the point? We already live in a world in which Davis has skilfully liberated himself from ever having to account the truth of his words or actions. That was when, four weeks ago, a select committee had the audacity to read back to him his absurd claims about how Britain would do free trade deals with the German automotive sector the day it left the EU, and he told them: “That was then, this is now. Ha ha ha ha.”

So when Davis appears in Austria and says, for example, “At this moment, at my home in Yorkshire a robot lawnmower, designed in Sweden and built in the north-east of England, will be mowing the grass,” the only appropriate response is: “Who cares?”

By this time next week, when absolutely nothing has changed, it may very well be that there was no robot lawnmower at all, and we can all have a good laugh about it. Ha ha ha ha.

He also told his audience that “I soon expect to receive my Amazon deliveries by drone.” And maybe he does. Maybe he doesn’t.

On Wednesday, he’s off to Athens and Budapest. There, the Brexit Secretary may very well announce out that his legs are made of his cheese. That he spends his weekends underwater, breathing through gills. When you’ve so successfully extricated yourself from the realm of truth, what does it matter?

So, at least when post-Brexit Britain does inevitably turn itself into a Mad Max hellscape, David Davis has furnished the film of all our own fiery deaths with a suitable tag-line. Mad Max: Brexit Road. That was then. This is now. Ha ha ha ha.