“Everyone talks about citizen journalism, but you don’t hear people talk so much about citizen dentistry.”

It’s on old gag, expressing the frustration of journalists whenever some enthusiastic amateur comes along and thinks the only qualification you need is a pencil and an opinion.

Like journalism, business is one of those things everyone knows all about, especially when they know nothing about it at all.

And nobody knows more about business than politicians, particularly politicians who have spent precisely zero minutes in business in their entire careers.

Take Dominic Raab, our enthusiastic fresh-faced karate-expert of a Brexit secretary.

© Getty Images

Raab, the foreign office lawyer turned career politician, is a man who knows all about it. He has form for applying his great business insight to all sorts of everyday issues, for instance explaining to the poverty-stricken how “the typical user of a food bank is not someone who’s languishing in poverty, it’s someone who has a cashflow problem”.

This trade-virgin knows so much about business he is willing to publicly upbraid real business people for suggesting their suffering may be connected to Brexit.

“It’s rather easy for a business to blame Brexit and the politicians rather than taking responsibility for their own situation,” he said.

One day, there will be an MBA module deconstructing the irony in this statement, coming as it does from the mouth of a man leading the single-most shortsighted international negotiation since Russia sold Alaska for two cents an acre.

As Mr Miyagi said – in what is surely black-belt Raab’s favourite flick, The Karate Kid – a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

His “little knowledge” (let’s call it blind ignorance) crystallised the view of British business that this is a government that not only doesn’t understand business, it doesn’t care. What it cares about is holding itself together, like a chief exec with a woeful set of figures preparing to bluff the board into why it’s somebody else’s fault their business is failing.

If Theresa May was the chief executive of any business in the UK, she’d have been fired long ago and right now be under investigation by the Financial Services Authority for criminally misleading the shareholders (that’s us, by the way). But she’s not, she’s only prime minister.

If Theresa May was the chief executive of any business in the UK, she’d have been fired long ago

So the private terror many, perhaps the majority, of business leaders feel about Brexit is compounded by the arrogance of a government persistently telling them they don’t know what they’re talking about.

You hear it on the airwaves every time someone with decades of top level sector experience comes on to explain in precise and clear detail exactly why Brexit presents an existential threat to their businesses.

Whether it’s farmers beginning to panic about vegetables and fruit left unpicked because seasonal labour from Eastern Europe is declining, or a banker warning of a crisis in skills the City Of London depends on, or a car manufacturer insisting just-in-time supply chains will collapse, or food manufacturers warning how less-well regulated markets will undercut them in both price and quality (quality guaranteed by regulations we fought so hard for at the EU table and now described as Brussels red-tape), or the drain of investment into the UK as uncertainty of the future drags on and on.

As far as the government is concerned, these people simply don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re doom-mongerers, they’re agenda-driven Remoaners, they’re proxies for the real bosses abroad, in thrall to the European Commission.

Their problem, says the government, is that they don’t see the bigger picture. They don’t see the glorious transformation of this impoverished island (hang on, weren't we the best performing economy in the G7 not long ago?) into that majestic ocean-going copper-bottomed global Britain.

Business sees it differently: their problem is not a lack of vision, but that they are forced to occupy a place called the real world, wrapped as it is around the landlocked sea of fantastical thought we call Westminster.

Business sees it differently: their problem is not a lack of vision, but that they are forced to occupy a place called the real world

If only everyone was like James Dyson, the man who believes in Brexit Britain so much he’s busy building manufacturing plants anywhere but here. Or Tim Martin, the Wetherspoons pub landlord whose blustery Brexit analysis makes Al Murray look like Warren Buffett.

However for those like me, who believe there’s an increasingly viable route out of this, there’s a problem. If there’s one thing business hates more than Brexit, it’s the uncertainty around Brexit. They want it over, pronto.

I should declare an interest here, as one of the few people on the planet to have – in a way – gained from Brexit. I launched a successful new national newspaper called The New European and you should try it sometime to compensate me for the perverse guilt complex I now feel by benefitting from this disaster.

So the business I run is not typical. The worse Brexit gets, the more people want to buy my product. As current circulation trends go, if Brexit drags on until 2029, The New European will outsell the Daily Mail and Sun combined.

But for most business leaders in the UK, they have now reached the point where they just want it done, whatever “it” is. British business may be scared, but it’s courageous enough to want to face into however bad Brexit is and start adapting, remodelling, pivoting, surviving.

"It’s absolutely reckless. But right now, the most important thing is that we get on with it."

They will never say publicly what a friend, an investor in multiple British businesses, said privately when I phoned for some thoughts last night on where business’ head is right now on Brexit.

“I hate Brexit. I hate everything it stands for, I hate the consequences – the bleeding obvious consequences – for businesses I invest in. I hate the idiots in Westminster who are screwing the country over. It’s absolutely reckless. But right now, the most important thing is that we get on with it.

“It’s going to ruin lives, set many industries back considerably and put many good people out of business altogether. But we’ve had more than two years of this now and every day of it has made business a little bit harder to do. If this drags on, a lot of people are going to collapse through sheer inertia.”

**Read more: ** Theresa May made all of Europe her enemy in Brussels

Why Theresa May must hold a second Brexit vote

Theresa May is going nowhere, so brace for a No Deal Brexit