18:00

There are few things more pleasurable in politics than being able to say ‘I told you so’ and when Sir Ivan Rogers, the former UK ambassador to the EU who has become one of the most compelling critics of the Brexit process, gave evidence to the Commons European scrutiny this afternoon, he got the opportunity.

Rogers said, in the autumn of 2016, soon after the vote to leave the EU, ministers told him that a free-trade agreement would be in place the day after Brexit. He said:

I was preoccupied by ministers telling me ‘don’t worry Ivan, you don’t understand,’ and they did say to me repeatedly, ‘you don’t understand, we’re going to have a trade deal in place with the European Union on the day after exit’. And I said ‘with the greatest of respects, we’re not.’ And I think I’m proven right.

Rogers does not seem to have named the credulous ministers (I’m just reading the Press Association copy), but it is a matter of public record that David Davis wrote a ConservativeHome article saying that “the new trade agreements will come into force at the point of exit from the EU” just before he was appointed Brexit secretary in July 2016.

Rogers also criticised the decision of the Boris Johnson government to stop attending some meetings in Brussels even before the UK left. He said:

After you leave, you are in this transition ... which may last a year or it may last two or three years. You are still hugely impacted by everything going on in those rooms. Why would you leave those rooms before you have to? The idea that they are liberated off that and go and work on exciting new trade deals. No, they’re not, they’re still living in Brussels and they’re either attending the working group that they used to be in or doing some other business. And some of the other business is finding out what the hell happened in the room when they weren’t there. It doesn’t strike me as a terribly sensible thing to do.

That’s all from me for today.

My colleague Ben Quinn is taking over now.