Why David Davis is confident a Brexit deal can be done

LBC broadcaster Iain Dale has transformed his Edinburgh festival shows into a series of Zoom-casts. First up, David Davis. The former Brexit secretary had arranged his web-cam in a study lined with scarlet law-books. A few hours earlier, he said, he’d completed a seven-mile jog. He’s 71.

Davis began by criticising the government over the corona-shambles. Last winter the World Health Organisation had rated Britain ‘top of the league in its preparedness’ for a flu pandemic. But the implementation of the plans had been disastrous.

The biggest single error was the failure on testing. It was over-centralised. We were over-proud of our test-approach. Had we done what the Koreans or Germans had done, many thousands would still be alive today.

Why hasn’t Boris’s popularity taken a bigger knock? Davis recalled the foot-and-mouth crisis in the spring of 2001. 

William Hague criticised the [Labour] government and he was factually right but his ratings went down because the country didn’t like seeing politicians attacking each other.