Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, has speculated that there might be “a special place in hell” for those people who promoted Brexit without having “even a sketch of a plan” for how to deliver it. If he is right, who is most likely to end up roasting in the eternal fires?

The former Brexit secretary David Davis was blissfully ignorant of the EU’s workings. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

David Davis: An ardent Brexiter from the first hour, Theresa May’s bluff and blustering first Brexit secretary was nonetheless so blissfully ignorant of the EU’s workings that he promised, a month before the referendum in June 2016, that Britain would be able to negotiate individual trade deals with Germany, France, Italy and Poland (the EU, as the government has since learned, negotiates collectively). Within minutes of a vote for Brexit, Davis predicted, German CEOs would be “knocking down Chancellor Merkel’s door demanding access to the British market”. Davis also reckoned that within a couple of years, “before anything material has changed, we can negotiate a free trade area massively bigger than the EU”, blithely assuring the House of Commons in October 2016 that there “will be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside”. If you have “a good eye and a steady hand, it’s easy enough”, he said. 4/5

The former foreign secretary Boris Johnson said the cost of Brexit would be ‘virtually nil’. Photograph: George Cracknell Wright/Rex/Shutterstock

Boris Johnson: One of the prime promoters of the sunlit, unicorn-rich uplands that await once Britain has freed itself from the shackles of an EU on the brink of collapse, the former foreign secretary pledged Brexit would permit “continued free trade and access to the single market” while allowing the UK to “take back control of huge sums of money, £350m a week, and spend it on our priorioties such as the NHS”. The cost of leaving “would be virtually nil, and the cost of staying would be very high”, he observed during the referendum campaign. And of companies’ more practical concerns about the possible impact on their bottom line, he reportedly remarked: “Fuck business.” Brexit, Johnson proclaimed – quoting Shakespeare’s Brutus – was a time for Britain “not to fight against the tide of history, but to take that tide at the flood and sail on to fortune”. 5/5

Michael Gove boldly assured referendum voters that Britain ‘can choose the path we want’. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

Michael Gove: Three months before the referendum, the then justice secretary – who recently conceded a no-deal, crash-out Brexit would be catastrophic for Britain’s farmers – was boldly assuring voters: “The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want.” A transition period would in fact be pointless, Gove argued in November that year: “I am prepared to take the economic hit to secure the economic benefits of not being in the single market and being outside the customs union. I simply want … a quickie divorce.” 3/5

Even a year after the referendum, Liam Fox was certain a free-trade deal would be ‘the easiest in history’. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex/Shutterstock

Liam Fox: Another true keeper of the Brexit flame untroubled by anything as inconvenient as reality, the international trade secretary was still blithely assuring anyone who cared to listen even a year after the referendum that the free-trade agreement Britain would be able to strike with the EU would be “one of the easiest in human history”. 3/5

The Eurosceptic Tory MP Daniel Hannan had speculated about a ‘60% council tax cut’ after Brexit. Photograph: Alamy

Daniel Hannan: The Eurosceptic Conservative MEP and “Brexit brain” has long been painting a rose-tinted picture of Britain’s departure from the EU radically at odds with what has transpired since the vote. In May 2015, for example, Hannan promised that nobody, “absolutely nobody, is talking about threatening our place in the single market”. Without the UK’s contributions to the EU budget, he was explaining a few months later, “we could give everyone a 60% council tax cut”. 4/5

The then Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, said the EU referendum was ‘our golden opportunity’. Photograph: Stéphanie Lecocq/EPA

Nigel Farage: The original Brexiter, the former Ukip leader has been – in Tusk’s words – promoting Brexit without a plan pretty much since he was first elected as an MEP in 1999. “The 23rd is our golden opportunity – let battle be joined,” he trumpeted as his longed-for referendum day was finally announced, explaining three days before the vote that the EU was a “hopelessly outdated, stagnant, failed project” and leaving it would instantly “revitalise our democracy”. Brexit would leave Britain absolutely “free to cooperate and trade with our European neighbours”, Farage promised, while “taking back control of our own destiny as a nation and being free to blaze our own trail in the world”. Slogans aplenty, then. Detailed plans – not so many. 5/5