David Davis has been making one of his regular appearances in front of the Brexit Select Committee (HERE), otherwise known as making a right idiot of himself. Dominic Cummings once said Davis was a narcissistic man who couldn't step over a puddle without stopping to admire his own reflection and this came over strongly yesterday.
He treats the select committee as a joke, laughing at his own attempts at humour and chuckling most of the time when he wasn't being totally patronising or airily dismissive when questions came up to which he didn't know the answer, which was most of them.
I can't recall the number of men that I have met like David Davis. Nothing he says later turns out to have meant what you thought it meant at the time. Bluster, obfuscation and long rambling answers without clarity or meaning. Yes, he was in charge of the negotiations but no, he didn't know anything. Things were probably happening and other things might or might not happen, sooner or later, he couldn't be sure.
And if he couldn't deny anything he had previously said was wrong he simply told the MPs that he had changed his mind - after looking at the facts. Hilary Benn referred him to an article Davis had written in July 2016 where he claimed he, "would expect the new Prime Minister on September 9th to immediately trigger a large round of global trade deals with all our most favoured trade partners. I would expect that the negotiation phase of most of them to be concluded within between 12 and 24 months". In other words we would have some trade deals in place by now and others ready for September this year.
He repudiated this by saying "that was then, this is now"! Amazing. It was one of those, "with one bound Jack was free" moments. Who could trust anything he said? The article Hilary Benn referred to is HERE.
So, in a few years, when he tells us Brexit was a mistake he will simply say that was then this is now. And you thought Davis had been in charge of our withdrawal? Don't worry, nothing will be down to him. Why on earth would you think it was?
John Crace in The Guardian writes about Davis' appearance HERE and have twelve awkward moments from it HERE. Michael Deacon in the Telegraph saw it like this HERE.
Meanwhile, Barnier has made a speech (HERE) to the Spanish parliament where, in his usual mystified way, he told reporters and members that he still didn't know what model of relationship the UK wanted after Brexit. He did say on divergence that some EU states might veto any trade deal that allowed the UK to diverge too far from EU standards. He talked about the level playing field that is the foundation of European competition rules.
Back at Westminster, Davis couldn't say which sectors of the economy we might want to have different rules for but he told the committee he saw his job as creating the freedom for future governments to diverge if it wished. He never learns. The EU is never going to allow this. We either have the freedom to diverge and no trade deal or we don't.
Davis at one point says we may want to achieve the same result by different rules which is an amazing reason to go through years and years of uncertainty just to rewrite complex rules so they're different but eventually get to the same end as the ones you've rejected.
Even Rees-Mogg looked underwhelmed.
