The Tory Brexit contradiction

It has not been a great few weeks for David Davis, the government’s designated Brexit Bulldog. In the first place, his ambition to succeed Theresa May as leader of the Conservative party and prime minister looks and feels increasingly at-odds with the temper of the times. I suppose parading buxom lasses in figure-hugging t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘It’s DD for me’ was meant as just a bit of nudging, winking, fun. The kind of thing you could get away with in simpler times. But it was naff a decade ago and seems something a little worse than that now. Perhaps it’s unfair to draw too many conclusions from a single episode, but it remains hard to shake the thought it was in some sense a character-revealing moment. Not brilliant, but certainly unsound. 

Something similar might be said about Davis’s day-job starring in Carry on Brexit. This is a genre-defying reboot of the original franchise; part slapstick farce, part tragicomedy. 

In Germany yesterday, Davis seemed to suggest that, look, leaving the single market should not actually mean leaving the single market.