The decision to cancel the £14m Seaborne Freight contract marks the inevitable ending of another farcical chapter in the government’s pre-Brexit preparations. But it should nonetheless send a further chill down the spines of those nervously awaiting what 29 March may bring – and once again leave many marvelling at the continued survival of Chris Grayling in post.

The hapless transport secretary, who avowed as a leading Brexiter that leaving the European Union would be easy, has been maintaining a tricky course since the referendum: continuing to project a glassy-eyed confidence that planes will fly and lorries will cross borders, while belatedly trying out some no-deal plans, just in case.

Yet every time Grayling has enacted his contingency planning, the panic has worsened. Local Kent MPs and councils were outraged to find work quietly starting to turn their motorway links into lorry parks.

Hauliers hired by the Department for Transport openly mocked a planning exercise at Manston airport, that cost tens of thousands of pounds to simulate a traffic jam roughly a hundredth of the size of the ones expected around the Channel ports. They laughed less when the DfT told them to apply in a lottery for permits for international travel, of which there were barely enough for a tenth of those who applied.

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The Seaborne debacle has been even worse: smacking of a combination of insouciance, carelessness and desperation. There is a reason that Ramsgate has fallen out of use by ferry companies – yet Grayling signed a deal with a firm with no boats or experience to operate a link to Ostend, Belgium, when neither port is near ready, according to local politicians. Due diligence on the directors, one of whose previous companies had been wound up leaving HMRC millions out of pocket, appeared not to have been done.

And worst of all, this was Grayling’s answer to fears that critical supplies – including vital medicines – would fail to get through once the frictionless trade route of Dover-Calais is jammed. Grayling has defended the deal time and again, while now even the firm’s backers, Arklow, have walked away. The only silver lining to the cancellation is the knowledge that, for all practical purposes, the venture was already doomed, and no taxpayer money has been paid out.

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Will Grayling go? In less chaotic times, with a governing party united and in control of events, a prime minister would surely not give him the choice. Yet Grayling appears to genuinely believe he sees things clearer than those around him: as psychologists term it, an unconscious incompetent, the worst kind of useless. Those who have watched Grayling deny all responsibility for the dysfunction of the railways – even to the point where he blamed others for an industry board he had just established and appointments he had personally overseen – won’t be putting much money on him doing the decent thing.