David Davis has an article in The Sun on Sunday (HERE) lambasting the chancellor's suggestion that borrowing will be £80 billion a year higher in 15 years time if we leave the EU without a deal. He uses strong language. The forecast is "bogus" and the leaking of the letter on the same day as Raab's speech is "spectacularly incompetent or deliberate". He seems blissfully unaware that being 2% down already, we are well on the way to shrinking the economy by even more than 8% in 2033, as Hammond said.
Note this excoriating criticism is from a Conservative, not an opposition spokesman (or perhaps it is?), a man who has a certain reputation himself for forecasting, having written an article for Conservative Home in July 2016 (HERE).
What did the great forecaster himself tell us just a few weeks after the referendum? Let's have a look:
"So be under no doubt: we can do deals with our trading partners, and we can do them quickly. I 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".
As we come up to the 9th September 2019, 24 months after he said the PM would trigger talks on global trade deals, we have just started consultations (HERE) with our own industries on trade deals with Australia, New Zealand, the USA and the Trans Pacific Partnership. These opened last month and are still open consultations so we haven't actually decided on our own strategy yet!
But back in July 2016, Davis said:
"So within two years, before the negotiation with the EU is likely to be complete, and therefore before anything material has changed, we can negotiate a free trade area massively larger than the EU".
"Now the new trade agreements will come into force at the point of exit from the EU, but they will be fully negotiated and therefore understood in detail well before then. That means that foreign direct investment by companies keen to take advantage of these deals will grow in the next two years".
Foreign direct investment FELL by 92% in 2017. Davis couldn't even get the direction of travel right.
"Brexit will deliver the circumstances that allow us to pursue an unfettered high growth strategy. Perhaps a better way to translate that into fiscal balance is to commit to using a significant proportion of the benefits of growth above a target level to deficit reduction, or in time surplus creation. That really would be 'fixing the roof while the sun is shining' ".
"This means that some of the economic benefits of Brexit will materialise even before the probable formal departure from the EU around December 2018".
We'll see what economic "benefits" materialise by March 2019, but don't hold your breath for anything.
Here's my forecast. In a few years time Davis and the other Brexiteers will be among the most reviled men in British history.
