“Theresa May. Can you hear me Theresa May? Your boys took one hell of a beating.” It’s been a rough week for the Brexit department. On Monday, the junior minister Robin Walker had to answer an urgent question from his own Eurosceptic backbencher, Bill Cash, on whether the government actually had any Brexit plans at all.

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The following day another minister, Steve Baker, was asked to explain a leaked document that suggested every Brexit outcome would leave the UK worse off than if it had remained in the EU. On Wednesday, Walker was again the fall guy as he announced the government would be publishing the research that Baker had only the previous day said he wouldn’t be publishing. And it was just the department’s bad luck that the whole team had to come back to the Commons to face Brexit questions. Trouble, it comes in fours.

Everyone – even David Davis and Suella Fernandes, who hadn’t had to bear the brunt of the ridicule – looked traumatised by the events of the last week. Tired, drawn and longing for a darkened room. So it was little surprise that the game plan seemed to be to get through the hour by saying as little as possible of any interest and sticking to mindless generalities.

It was once again left to Walker and Baker to do most of the heavy lifting at the start of the session, though Fernandes chipped in from time to time with her own special words of wisdom. The message was clear. The prime minister had been entirely coherent in her vision for Britain. Coherently incoherent. Britain was looking for a deep and special relationship, a bespoke deal that only existed in her imagination. Everything was going better than anyone with no expectations whatsoever could possibly have expected. And, yes, there were rumours the civil service was full of remainer commies hellbent on knackering Brexit. Tomorrow belongs to us.

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While all this was going on, Davis appeared distracted. Half asleep even. As if he was hoping that by closing his eyes no one would realise he was actually there and he could get through the whole hour without having to say a word. He, too, started in familiar soundbites before the shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, probed him on what exactly he knew of the leaked economic analyses.

Davis began to adlib. When he had casually mentioned to the Brexit select committee in December that his department was modelling a few rough scenarios, what he had really been referring to were these cabinet discussion papers. So he had known, sort of. Which wasn’t exactly the impression Baker had given. Starmer then asked when he had been briefed on the outcomes of the analyses. Davis answered another question entirely, suggesting that people had been trying to pretend that ministers had been critical of civil servants. Even though no pretence had been required.

The Brexit select committee chair, Hilary Benn, pointed out that the absence of any modelling of the government’s preferred outcome was not just one of those things that civil servants had not yet got round to, but rather conclusive proof that the government had no idea of what its preferred outcome was. Other than La La Land.

At this point things rather fell apart. Despite half-hearted assurances that the prime minister had their full backing, every minister who came to the dispatch box seemed to have a slightly different take on what exactly May wanted. Or even meant. Her overnight remarks about the status of EU nationals after March 2019 seemed to have been as much of a surprise to the Brexit ministers as to everyone else. The lasting impression of the session was of a government department making it up as it went along. Brexit. The race to the bottom. With every man – and solitary woman – for themselves.