If the alphabet was 1,000 letters long, you’d still have no trouble filling it from start to finish with the lies of Brexit. No other topic in our nation’s history has inspired so many untruths.

As it is, you’ll have to settle for 26. As we head towards God knows what on 29 March, it is timely to look back and reflect on the lies, and the liars, who got us this far. So here’s my A to Z of Brexit lies. Please feel free to suggest any additions to me on Twitter (@mk1969). I think there could be a book deal in this.

A is for Anglo-Irish relationship. “Nor is there any prospect of security checks returning to the border. The common travel area between the UK and Ireland pre-dates our EU membership and will outlast it. The unique status Irish citizens are accorded in the UK predates EU membership and will outlast it. There is no reason why the UK’s only land border should be any less open after Brexit than it is today.” Theresa Villiers, Vote Leave press release, 14 April 2016

B is for Billions. Thirty-nine of them to be precise. That's the cost of exiting the European Union. Hard Brexiteers such as Dominic Raab like to kid on that we won't be paying Brussels a penny if we leave without a deal, just the kind of gung-ho statement you'd expect from a man who only recently realised Dover was an important trading port. The chancellor of the exchequer says we will have to pay a big chunk, deal or no deal.

C is for Cameron. Perhaps fittingly, Brexit began with a lie that accidentally came true. David Cameron’s 2015 manifesto promise of a second referendum was designed to keep Tory EU haters happy. He assumed he’d be blocked by Liberal Democrat coalition partners and then he went and won a majority. Which is why C is also for Catastrophe. Cameron also promised he would stay on as PM if Leave won. He quit immediately.

D is for Daily Mail. The Mail, under past editor Paul Dacre, spread more lies about the EU than any other newspaper, but between them and the Telegraph, Sun, and Express, the creativity of journalism around our relationship with Europe has been exceptional. From excessively curved bananas to milk jugs being banned, from euro notes making you impotent to cows being forced to wear nappies and Bombay mix having to be renamed, our press has waged a decades-long campaign to ridicule the EU. But who’s looking ridiculous now?

E is for Election. “There isn’t going to be one. It isn’t going to happen. There is not going to be a general election.” So said Theresa May’s spokesman in March 2017. A month later, and with soaring 41 per cent approval ratings (three times more popular than Jeremy Corbyn at the time) she “reluctantly” told the nation that a vote was necessary to strengthen her hand in EU negotiations. She lost her majority, throwing the entire process into the abject state of chaos that is Britain today.

F is for Fox. International secretary Liam Fox sold us on the idea of a glorious global Britain, once again creating new waves of international trading and prosperity. “The free trade agreement we will have to do should be one of the easiest in human history,” he said. F is also for* F**ing Idiot.

F is also for Farage. Of the great litany of untruths and outright lies told by the self-styled “Mister Brexit”, perhaps the most heinous was his "Breaking Point" poster, a moment when his xenophobia transcended its usual dog-whistle status into outright blatant racism.

G is for Gove. “The day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want.” Take a bow, Michael Gove. Thirty-two months later and Britain is still hopelessly lost, no Brexit pathway in sight.

H is for Health Tourism. One of the dog-whistle scares sold to readers of the Daily Mail, Sun and Express during the runup to the Referendum was the extraordinary cost of so-called health tourism – people travelling to the UK solely to benefit from our generous health system. In the case of EU citizens, this is a total fabrication. The truth is that British citizens in the EU receive five times the value of the treatment we give to EU citizens here.

H is also for Hell. It’s going to be a crowded place if Donald Tusk is correct.

I is for Immigration. The idea that countries within the EU have no control of immigration is a lie. We do, but we choose not to exercise it. Tony Blair removed the border exit checks you see in almost every other European country in 1998. That meant we had no way of knowing who was still in the UK and who had left. Under existing rules, EU member states can send EU nationals home after three months if they haven’t found a job or cannot support themselves. We could enforce that, keeping only those actively contributing to our economy. Theresa May, as home secretary, chose not to.

J is for Johnson. Where to begin? At the beginning perhaps. When Boris the great charlatan first flipped to the Leave side: “There will continue to be free trade and access to the single market” – Boris Johnson, the Telegraph, 26 June 2016

K is for Knucklehead, AKA David Davis. Davis came close to contempt proceedings for the blasé way he bluffed and blagged his way through time as Brexit secretary. Notably he assured parliament that his department was creating detailed impact assessments of Brexit’s effect on the British economy. He later confessed to a select committee that this was untrue and in fact no impact assessments had been made. It all lent weight to Vote Leave organiser Dominic Cummings assessment of DD: “Thick as mince, lazy as a toad and vain as Narcissus.”

L is for Lord Digby Jones. “Not a single job would be lost because of Brexit,” the ex-CBI boss and former lawyer told us before the referendum. Two years later, he was standing by it, falling back on the semantic difference between “Brexit” and “uncertainty around Brexit”. Either way, thousands of jobs have already been repatriated to the continent and government impact assessments forecast a 9.3 per cent hit to the economy under No Deal.

M is for May. Only Donald Trump tops Mrs May’s comfort with leadership in our post-truth age. The central, unforgivable lie she propagates is that she’s acting in the national interest in delivering “The Will Of The People” when she is, in fact, the first British PM in our history to knowingly pursue a policy that will damage the nation. Brexit has already cost two per cent in lost predicted growth and each household is £900 poorer than it would have been had the UK voted to remain in the EU, according to the Bank Of England. “Nobody voted to be poorer,” eh? Oh, yes they did. They just didn’t know it at the time.

N is for NHS. “Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS.” So wrote Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph. Then they plastered it in massive letters across a bus and drove it across the country. The rest is history.

O is for Opportunities. Vote Leave statement two weeks before the Referendum: “After we vote Leave, we would immediately be able to start negotiating new trade deals with emerging economies and the world’s biggest economies (the US, China and Japan, as well as Canada, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand and so on), which could enter into force immediately after the UK leaves the EU.” Japan recently concluded one of the world’s biggest trade agreements with... the EU. As for us, we’re still waiting.

P. There is no P. The politicians took it.

Q is for Queues. Not for food, yet, but for lorries. Hapless transport secretary Chris Grayling told Question Time in March last year: ”We will maintain a free flowing border at Dover. We will not impose checks in the port. The only reason we would have queues at the border is if we put in place restrictions that created those queues. We are not going to do that.” It’s a lie. The FT reported that lorry checks under a No Deal taking as little as 80 seconds would result in an “unrecoverable” backlog of lorries and the government itself is planning to turn the M20 into a lorry park.

R is for Rees-Mogg. Again, no shortage here. But perhaps the one that fully demonstrates Rees-Mogg’s capacity for manipulative, cynical lying was when he conspired with Steve Baker to accuse, from the floor of the commons, the civil service of trying to scupper Brexit. Baker later apologised. Rees-Mogg, characteristically, has never done so.

S is for the Single Market. “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market,” said Daniel Hannan, Brexiteer MEP, before the referendum. Absolutely everybody is now.

T is for Take Back Control. The greatest lie of them all? Quite possibly. The hypnotic mantra was perfect for its audience: millions who – quite rightly – felt disenfranchised and anxious for their future. But lack of control over the EU wasn’t the issue; it was lack of control over a Westminster programme of austerity set by George Osborne.

U is for the Union. “If we vote to leave then I think the union will be stronger… I think when we vote to leave it will be clear that having voted to leave one union the last thing people in Scotland wanted to do is to break up another.” Michael Gove, BBC, 8 May 2016.

V is for Vote Leave. Otherwise known as Lie Central, the official campaign body for exiting the EU delivered a wonderful array of deceit, including the following:

“The EU’s supporters say, ‘We must have access to the single market’. Britain will have access to the single market after we vote Leave.”

“The idea that our trade will suffer... is silly.”

“Let’s give our NHS the £350m the EU takes every week.”

“Taxpayers’ money should be spent on filling in potholes in Britain, rather than being squandered on foreign bridges.”

“If you are still wondering what it will look like if we came out, think about this... Lower taxes as a result of no longer having to pay into the EU budget.”

It really is an endless and unmitigated litany of rubbish.

W is for Will Of The People. It’s not now, and it’s debatable if it ever was. Latest polling suggests 45 per cent of people now want to Remain, versus 35 per cent who want to Leave and 22 per cent undecided. Even in the referendum itself, only 37 per cent of the electorate voted for Leave, the rest either voted Remain or not at all. Some Will Of The People.

X is for Xenophobia. In 2014, Nigel Farage laid it out on the line: “If you said to me, would I like to see over the next ten years a further five million people come into Britain and if that happened we’d all be slightly richer, I’d say I’d rather we weren’t slightly richer.” In March 2017: “If Brexit is a disaster, I will go and live abroad. I'll go and live somewhere else.” Such principles!

Y is for Youth Vote. More than 70 per cent of 18-24 year olds (the generation who will live with Brexit longer than any other) voted to Remain. By the time 29 March comes and we leave the EU, around 1.4m more young people will be of voting age. The idea that Brexit is the will of these people is a dangerous lie.

Z is for Zombie Government. Theresa May leads a government trapped between two warring factions; one side, the hard-Brexiteers, led by Jacob Rees-Mogg and on the other side the sane. Any pretence that the government is in control of the Brexit process is long dead. Meanwhile, all the domestic failings centred around George Osborne’s eight years of austerity – the failings that in large part caused Brexit in the first place – continue to drift, unaddressed. Whatever solution to Brexit we arrive at, it’s this that will be its legacy. A country more divided, fractious and disappointed than ever before in our history.

Now read:

Delaying Brexit could mean a negotiation free of Juncker and Tusk

Where the hell has David Cameron been?

Brexit and history: five pointless analogies