Others such as the aerospace industry worth £74 billion a year, including Airbus, may at last be waking up to the devastating consequences of our decision to leave the single market. But when the aviation manufacturers association, representing 1,000 firms, recently sent an appeal to Michel Barnier, all they could ask for was a special deal to allow them to continue trading with the EU, on terms which Barnier has already made clear the rules could not possibly allow.

What makes all this so terrifying is that 95 per cent of it was wholly avoidable. I have said it before, and will say it again: if only Mrs May had properly understood what she was letting us in for, she could long since instead have applied to join sovereign Norway in the European Free Trade Association and thus remain in the wider European Economic Area (EEA). We would be completely outside the political EU and three quarters of its laws; free to make our own trade deals with the rest of the world; and even to exercise selective control over immigration from the EU.

Above all we would have been free to continue trading within the single market much as we do now, and this prospect of an economic catastrophe need never have been bearing down on us. A handful of Labour MPs dimly understood this. But the rest of our politicians, like the chairman of the company we lunched with last week, have remained lost in the wishful thinking that such a disaster “could never happen”. As we shall see, it can, and we will have brought it on ourselves.

For the love of newts