Minutes after the prime minister had announced she was downgrading his Brexit department to little more than a Jobcentre Plus office for otherwise unemployable MPs, Dominic Raab found himself in front of the Brexit select committee.

The news didn’t immediately appear to have been passed on to the new Brexit secretary who bounced into the room with the swagger of someone who was fairly confident he was a wee bit brighter than his predecessor.

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Being one step ahead of David Davis is still being several steps behind everyone else.

The committee chair, Hilary Benn, looked embarrassed to confront Raab with the realities of his demotion and began the session by treating him as if he was still a cabinet minister. A kindness. Could he explain why everyone but him and a few other hardline Brexiters thought that a no-deal outcome would be an economic disaster for the UK?

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He couldn’t. Raab is a natural middle manager who can’t quite believe he hasn’t been made chief executive, and started babbling nonsense he had picked up from the assertiveness training module on a company away day.

Everyone else was wrong because they were wrong and he was right. There were too many people talking Britain down. What was needed was a bit of mindless cheerfulness. Or cheerful mindlessness.

The more Raab tried to explain how well he had mastered his brief, the more depressed the members of the committee became. He could offer no real sector-by-sector analysis of the effect of not having a common rulebook for banking and services because, although the department might once have considered the economic impact, their findings had got locked in a cupboard and no one could find the key. But he did hope to publish 70 different sectoral no-deal reports some time over the next six months.

Benn looked over his glasses. He wanted to check that Raab realised the UK was supposed to be close to finalising the negotiations in October. Wasn’t there a danger that some of the analysis would be published far too late to be of any use?

Raab nodded his head enthusiastically. He certainly hoped so. That way no one would ever bother to read them and find out they had never been of any value.

There was one piece of good news, though. Raab was delighted to report that a few out-of-date tins of John West tuna had been stockpiled in Felixstowe so there were adequate supplies of food for at least a few days in the event of no deal.

And in any case, everyone would be so thrilled that Brexit might turn out to be a tremendous success in 50 years’ time or so that they wouldn’t mind starving to death while they waited.

At this point, the committee could no longer delay the inevitable. Someone had to point out to Raab that he was a minister in name only and that it was Theresa May and the man sitting next to him who were basically in charge.

Raab was really there to carry the bags and put Post-it notes in the relevant pages of the files. The Tory John Whittingdale volunteered to take one for the team and put him right.

“Aren’t you in effect the minister?” he said to Olly Robbins, the top civil servant who is the only person Theresa May believes has an outside chance of negotiating the least damaging deal for the UK.

“Oh no,” said Robbins urbanely. He was far more powerful than that. Please don’t confuse him with a common or garden cabinet minister who knew next to nothing. About anything.

Robbins then went on to talk the committee through the Chequers deal. It was completely untrue that the cabinet hadn’t been informed of the second white paper that he had written. Not that it was a white paper or that he had written it. Rather it had mysteriously appeared out of the ether and ministers had failed to notice it.

By now, it had finally dawned on Raab that he was nothing more than a glorified bag carrier. And he didn’t like it.

“We are one team and there is one chain of command,” he snapped, his back ramrod straight. Indeed there was a chain of command. And he was right at the bottom of it. Below the prime minister. Below Robbins. Below even the Four Pot Plants.

“There, there,” said Robbins soothingly as they left together. “If you play your cards right, you’re definitely in with a shout of winning ‘most improved manager of the month’ at the south-west regional awards dinner.” Because he’s worth it.