It’s a mixed blessing having Greg Clark as your warm-up man. On the upside there’s the certainty that nothing you could possibly say would be duller and more meaningless than anything the business secretary had come up with; the payback is that you start with a flatlining audience.

Boris Johnson looked out towards the few hundred near-comatose faces gathered in the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre, London, for the British Chambers of Commerce annual conference. “It’s fantastic to be here among you ‘can do’ people,” he began, doubtfully. “Can do” was overstating it rather. After half an hour of the Gregger, this lot were looking more like “can’t do”. Or “can don’t”.

Still, the foreign secretary wasn’t the sort of bloke to duck a challenge. In any case, if he couldn’t wake up a few small-business people then he could always amuse himself. He was fed up with everyone being so gloomy the whole time. “Come off it, sunshine,” he said. “Things have never been better. We’re all living longer and we’ve got mobile phones.” That was about it.

Pineapples. They were another reason to feel good about ourselves. Back in the day they only existed as chunks in a tin. Now you could buy them straight off a plane from Ghana. Amazing. Better still, if you didn’t want to put the pineapples on a pizza you could always turn them into jam and flog them to the Yanks. That was the wonder of Brexit.

By now most of the hall was wide awake. It wasn’t every day you could get to watch the foreign secretary have a narcissistic breakdown live on stage. Boris didn’t care. He never does. Any attention is better than none. The one thing he can’t cope with is being ignored.

Everything was going to be great. Better than great. John Major might have complained the government was naive in thinking Brexit was going to be easy but that was only because he wasn’t in full command of the facts. So what if some bloke from Nissan was talking about the car industry being on the verge of a disaster. So what if overseas companies taking over British businesses didn’t really count as inward investment? Brexit was a doddle. All you had to do was close your eyes and think Brexit and Brexit would happen.

Boris was now in a fugue state; so far gone that not even his nurses could save him. Globalisation. He loved it. Every single bit of it. Why did everyone talk down globalisation? What the world needed was more globalisation not less. If JK Rowling could sell a few more books to Punjabi children, then publishers in London would be able to have long lunches in Soho. Who cared that most of the people who had voted for Brexit had done so because they didn’t think globalisation was doing them any favours? Not Boris.

Sure, everyone in Europe had initially been in a state of shock when they discovered that he and David Davis would be in charge of the Brexit negotiations, but now they had come to see the funny side. What everyone had to remember was all this stuff about not being able to do a deal with the EU was just doom mongering. The economy was booming. Nothing was going to change. Our relationship with the other 27 countries in the EU would be exactly the same apart from the fact that we wouldn’t be in the EU. EU law and UK law would be as one. Thank you and good night.

It had now begun to dawn on everyone that Boris was totally delirious. Why was he talking as if we had already the left the EU when we hadn’t even triggered article 50? Why had he campaigned so hard for Britain to leave the EU if nothing was going to change? More importantly, did he think they were all born yesterday?

Once Boris had burnt himself out, some of these concerns were voiced. “Why can’t you just be honest and say that some people will be better off as a result of Brexit and some won’t?” asked a Sky reporter. Boris looked confused. Since when had anyone in government ever been honest about Brexit?