Good article HERE in The Guardian by Dan Roberts about the character of David Davis. Roberts has interviewed quite a number of people and the picture they paint is not particularly flattering. I think he has always comes over as a blustering idiot but the article more or less confirms it. A few extracts give a flavour of it:
"Some right wing critics have already been publicly scathing. Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings, memorably described the Brexit secretary as “thick as mince, lazy as a toad, and vain as Narcissus”. Davis’s former chief of staff James Chapman also accused his boss of drunken misbehaviour in a House of Commons bar and working a three-day week. “I feel it is time to get annoyed with Mr Davis,” wrote Thatcher biographer Charles Moore recently. “For ages now, he has been flying from meeting to meeting, speaking at dinner after dinner, staying late at party after party, encouraging his bonhomous reassurance to be favourably contrasted with Mrs May’s anxious gloom.”
A senior colleague who worked for him confirms his fondness for a drink. “He is not stupid, but he is quite idle – a good parliamentarian and maverick in Tory terms, yet immensely difficult because he’s just got thousands of prejudices for every occasion.”
DExEU [the Department for Exiting the European Union] was set up for political reasons,” explains a former Brexit minister. “People who knew what they were doing were pretty thin on the ground.”
“At the outset he believed a lot of his own bluster and rhetoric,” says a former colleague at DExEU. “DD believed the stuff about how we were not a supplicant, with many more cards, how we were in pole position, we could play off the member states against each other, we were going to undermine the theologians of the institutions.”
A Downing Street official said. “The UK is run by generalists. There is no particular sense that if DD had been a better or more detail-orientated minister that it would decisively gone one way or another, because ultimately the real crunch decisions were taken by the PM.”
“Our political class, including officials and journalists, is coming up against a process which isn’t just about bright men who are plausible and get the broad outlines. The EU is built on a really rigid legal order. Our difficulty is when our generalism comes into contact.”
“We just can’t cope with it,” agrees the DExEU source. “We don’t have the wisdom in the system. The political class can’t cope with the complexity of it.”
How true.
