It started badly and got steadily worse. Labour MP Meg Hillier opened the public accounts committee session on the state of UK borders after Brexit by asking Patsy Wilkinson, the second most senior civil servant at the Home Office, how many different digital services programme directors for the UK Border Force there had been recently.

“Two or three,” said Wilkinson hesitantly.

“I think it’s more like eight or 10,” Hillier observed.

Wilkinson shook her head. It definitely wasn’t that many.

“Yes it is,” Hillier insisted, checking back through the records. And why had the last incumbent left less than a year after taking up the job?

“He had his reasons,” Wilkinson said mysteriously. But everything was just fine because the agency had built in more leadership capacity into its roles so he wouldn’t be missed anyway. Though he would still be replaced.

At this point it dawned on the committee members that they could possibly be wasting their time. If the Home Office didn’t know how many digital services programme directors it had had coming through its doors, the chances of it keeping track of people coming into the country were minimal.

‘The border is a system. But it’s a system that sits within other systems’

Labour’s Caroline Flint quite reasonably thought to ask just who was in charge of managing the border.

No one, the five civil servants from the Home Office, the UK Border Force, HMRC and Defra said in unison. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.

“The border is a system,” Wilkinson explained, keen to make things as opaque as possible. “But it’s a system that sits within other systems.”

And there were yet more systems that sat within those systems. So there was no real point in anyone doing anything.

With the session turning into an episode of W1A, Flint wondered if the government department and agencies should be more worried about the impact of Brexit than they appeared to be. What preparation were they making for a “no deal” scenario?

Simple, said Wilkinson. It was all a question of risk assessment. And their risk assessment was that nothing needed doing.

So no one was planning to do any more checks on people or freight after Brexit than they had beforehand, so there was no reason why anything shouldn’t continue much the same as it was now.

Conservative Luke Graham tried to make sense of the logic of this. How could the risk be the same when the whole point of Brexit was to encourage more trade with non-EU countries and to collect import tariffs from EU countries on some goods? And wasn’t telling the whole world that they weren’t going to bother to do any extra checks an invitation for people to take liberties?

The civil servants looked puzzled. They hadn’t thought of that. Cue plenty of back covering.

“We’re going to try to remove people who shouldn’t be in the country by nudging them digitally,” said Wilkinson, a little desperately. While taking fingering people to a new level.

“I’m struggling to see a dynamic response to Brexit from any of you,” said Conservative Heidi Allen.

This sent all the civil servants into a tailspin. They really weren’t as clueless as they seemed, they claimed. They just had to appear that way to try to make the government ministers look like they vaguely knew what they were doing.

But the thing was that no one had the faintest idea about Brexit. So everyone had to make the assumption that everything was going to be fine, because the moment you got a grip on reality and realised the assumption was almost certainly false, then you had to face the possibility Brexit wasn’t doable.

“I see,” said Hillier. “But how long are you going to need to make this assumption for?” No one knew. That was well above their pay grade.

“How many contingency plans do you have?” asked Labour’s Gareth Snell.

“I don’t know,” said Karen Wheeler, the director general for border coordination at HMRC. “That’s contingent on what you call a contingency plan.”

And because some contingency plans might be filed under impact assessment reports.

Clare Moriarty from Defra did have one solution. The border ports could be moved inland. Dover could be relocated to Ashford, with the rest of Kent donated to France. That way if there was a lorry park, it wouldn’t be in the UK.

With everyone losing the will to live, the committee moved on to the Irish border. What plans did they have for that?

For once, the civil servants had a clear answer. They had done absolutely nothing.

In a situation where the government had made no progress and literally anything could happen, the best bet was to hibernate – the government of idiots, administered by idiots on behalf of a country they took for idiots.

John Crace’s new book, I, Maybot, is published by Guardian Faber. To order a copy for £6.99, saving £3, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders, minimum p&p of £1.99.

