In the right circumstances, preparing for failure is no bad thing.

It’s a reckless government that doesn’t have contingency plans for the economy tipping into recession, gas supplies running out or the hacking of NHS computers. We saw that irresponsibility last year in the government’s lack of planning for a Leave vote in the EU referendum. Crispin Blunt, the Tory chair of the foreign affairs select committee, rightly called that “an act of gross negligence”.

But there is another kind of preparation for failure which is altogether less noble. The kind where governments see a crisis looming and think not about how to avert it but how to divert the blame. And make no mistake, that is what we are starting to see with Brexit.