David Davis has dismissed the idea that he and other prominent leave campaigners were put in charge of Brexit so they could be held responsible if it went wrong, saying “there will be plenty of blame to go round” if that were to happen.

Speaking on the fringes of the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, the Brexit secretary said it was “conspiracy stuff” to believe Theresa May appointed him, the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, and the international trade secretary, Liam Fox, with that in mind.

Davis said: “If it goes wrong, the whole government will be blamed. If it goes right there will be much more than enough credit to go round, and if it goes wrong there will be plenty of blame to go round. But I don’t worry about all that.”

Davis gave a predictably bullish account of how he expected the UK’s EU exit to play out, saying London did not have to fear losing its prominent position in financial services.

He said much of this was down to the anglophone culture of the finance world, and the lifestyle available in the capital. Davis added: “There’s a lot of dreaming going on by our competition who don’t really know the issues we’re talking about.”

While Davis gave no clues as to what he expected the technicalities of Brexit to look like, he did give a definition of what he believed would be a measure of its success.

“The sort of basic metric is to have a very free, very unfettered trading relationship with Europe, but an even bigger, even freer trading relationship with the rest of the world,” Davis said. “And the economy in a better position than it is – not just for one year, but strategically in a better position.”



Elsewhere, Davis said he had predicted a win for the leave side two months before the referendum on 23 June, and had even won “a little bit of money” by placing a bet on the 52% to 48% victory margin.



The Brexit secretary also said he came to support May for prime minister – he had first backed Johnson “for about five minutes” – after receiving an assurance that limiting immigration would be her main task.

“I went to see her and I asked if she was going to put control of the borders as her top priority, as that was the issue,” Davis said. “And she did, she said yes. And I said I’d support her.”

Davis also said that on the day he was appointed Brexit secretary, he had almost missed the opportunity by turning off his phone. He had switched it off after getting numerous calls about his House of Commons motion to censure Tony Blair over the Chilcot findings – and had gone for a drink with an aide.

He added: “At about 7.30pm she said, ‘Twitter’s saying you’re at No 10. I laughed – I picked up my glass of wine and said, take a photograph and show them I’m not.”

Eventually, he turned on his phone to find “a great stream of text messages from No 10, and you could see the pitch of the messages going up – ‘please call No 10’”.

Davis recalled that the prime minister gave him a choice about the name of his new department, saying: “She said, ‘We’re creating a department which we’re thinking of calling the Department for leaving the European Union or the Department for exiting the European Union.’ I laughed and said, ‘Make it exiting, we can call it Department X.’ It never caught on.”