It could have been a scene from The Office. One in which David Brent had been summoned to HQ for a performance appraisal. One where he died on his feet while believing he was nailing it. Only for David Brent read David Davis.

The Brexit secretary smiled broadly as he began his latest appearance before the select committee. He was feeling the love already. The chairman, Hilary Benn, chose to put him at ease with a few straightforward questions. Would there be a draft legal text before parliament to implement phase one of the EU withdrawal process?

“Um …,” Davis dithered. “I haven’t thought through when it would surface. Ha, ha, ha!”

That turned out to be the session’s clarity highpoint. He didn’t know exactly when he would next be meeting Michel Barnier, but it would probably be some time after next Monday. He didn’t know if he would be publishing a sector paper on the financial services industry. Though, on balance, he suspected he might. And he couldn’t say in what areas he wanted to diverge from the EU in terms of regulatory freedom: he only knew he wanted to do so somewhere. Just for the hell of it.

There was no saving Davis from himself. When Benn asked whether he stood by an article he had written in July 2016, in which he had claimed Britain could negotiate a bigger free trade area than the EU in under two years, the Brexit secretary was incredulous.

“I think that was before I was a minister,” he said. “So that was then and this is now. Ha, ha, ha!” No one else joined in the laughter, though a few of the Leave MPs on the committee gave him a sympathetic glance.

Curiously, Davis took this as a sign of encouragement and when Labour’s Emma Reynolds quizzed him on a speech he had previously given on the advantages of staying in the customs union, he gave an almost identical answer. “New facts, new opinions,” he said airily. “Ha, ha, ha!”

A silence fell over the room as everyone absorbed the new relativism. Things were only true just so long as Davis chose to believe they were. He was free to change his mind about what he thought at any time. Holding him or the government accountable for what he had said was a category error. It was even possible that at some later date he might realise that everything he had been telling the committee today was a complete load of tosh, so nothing he was saying could ever be taken at face value again. A few MPs reached for their revolvers.

Davis sat back in his chair and began telling himself a joke involving a trip he had made to Detroit. He was on a roll. Various MPs tried to bring him back to reality, but the Brexit secretary was so far through the looking-glass he was beyond help. Everyone else was a bit thick and no one knew better than him. Nor could he see the absurdity in his announcement that we would be leaving the jurisdiction of the European court of justice with the European withdrawal bill and be rejoining it the following day with the implementation bill.

Not even Jacob Rees-Mogg gave him an easy time. Since the Tory MP was made leader of the European Research Group, his pro-Brexit rhetoric has upped a notch and he accused Davis of turning Britain into a vassal state and urged him to be more insincere in his dealings with the EU. Given what we had already heard, you’d have thought it would be hard for anyone to tell if Davis was being sincere or not. After all, he doesn’t always appear to know himself.