Who better to update the House of Commons on the progress of the Brexit negotiations following the informal EU summit in Salzburg than someone who wasn’t there? Not that ignorance has ever been a problem for Dominic Raab. The Brexit secretary is blessed with the supreme self-confidence of someone who isn’t aware of how little he actually knows so is always happy to listen to the sound of his own voice. In fact, there’s little in life he prefers.

The negotiations were going totally to plan, Raab said. Apart from in one or two key areas that were proving trickier than expected. But all would be well provided we held our nerve and kept our less than 20-20 vision focus. The UK had put forward serious and credible proposals that had been roundly rejected by the EU and a majority of MPs and it was time for the EU to match our ambition and wishful thinking. And if the worst came to the worst, we’d crash out with a no deal because bankrupting the country was infinitely better than not bankrupting it.

Keir Starmer has always responded to Raab with something approaching pity. The pity one lawyer might give to another whose job it is to defend the indefensible. Since the party conference break, the shadow Brexit secretary has added exasperation to his armoury. Was Raab aware there were only weeks left to agree a deal and that so far the government was no nearer to resolving the Northern Ireland backstop or what kind of future trading arrangements Britain would have with the EU? So could he please have some straight answers?

He could. The straight answer was that there were no straight answers. Getting a deal by October had only ever been an aim. When he had said a deal would be reached by the October summit, he had never said which October he was talking about. So there. And he had never committed to signing up to a customs union as part of a Northern Ireland backstop. All he had promised was that Northern Ireland would remain in a temporary customs arrangement. Which was something entirely different. If Raab were ever to listen to a recording of himself he would die of embarrassment.

On the plus side, Raab has a way to go before he is as deranged as some of the Tory Brexiters. Iain Duncan Smith demanded to know why the European Research Group’s paper on Northern Ireland that had been dismissed as unworkable by anyone who knew anything Northern Ireland wasn’t the government’s official position on Northern Ireland. John Redwood channelled his inner alien to insist that the Brexit dividend would pay for everything if it was invested overseas. Or on another planet. Steve Baker was just Steve Baker. The stupid person’s Ayn Rand. Which is saying something.

All the serious incoming flak came from the Labour benches. Hilary Benn wondered how Raab could claim the backstop could be time limited when the whole deal was predicated on the fact it would have to remain in place until such time a permanent solution was reached. Oh, said a bewildered Raab. Couldn’t it somehow be both temporary and infinite? Like the universe. You just had to get used to the idea of a 10-dimensional space-time continuum. Or something.

Raab also had no answer to whether he was ruling in or out applying common external tariffs. He sort of was and he sort of wasn’t. “It would give us the advantages of those things we want to take advantage of,” he explained. By now it was even beginning to dawn on Raab – no small thing for a man of his intellectual self-regard – that he was being made to sound like a simpleton and he responded by getting angry. A vein in his temple started throbbing and his answers became increasingly snappy and tetchy.

Labour carried on applying the pressure. Just how little detail did Raab imagine he would have to give for the government not to commit to a blind Brexit? Raab didn’t rightly know, but felt sure it was best to keep things definitely vague. As so often we were back to a variation of Schrodinger’s Brexit, where everything could simultaneously mean something and nothing. If we are slowly edging towards a Brexit deal, it will be in spite of rather than because of the Brexit secretary’s best efforts. An achievement of sorts.