It’s the kind of thing that can happen if you believe what you read on the internet, but it’s perhaps a mistake David Davis would have preferred to avoid.

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At the close of his joint press conference with the EU’s Michel Barnier following the historic first day of article 50 negotiations in Brussels, the Brexit minister summed up his approach to the talks with a quote from Winston Churchill.

Or at least, he though it was Winston Churchill. “The pessimist,” Davis said, “sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees possibility in every difficulty.”



Unfortunately, although an online search for the saying throws up any number of posts attributing the words to Britain’s wartime leader, it seems unlikely that he ever actually said them.

Play Video 0:25 David Davis blunders with Churchill quotation

According to Richard Langworth, senior fellow of the Hillsdale College Churchill Project in the US, none of the quotation’s multiple online appearances “offer a source – speech, book or whatever. If [Churchill] said it, no one has produced the source.”

In a blog post on the subject, Langworth adds that quotation-checking book The Quote Verifier was unable to trace the saying to Churchill either (although he did say in 1954: “Myself, I am an optimist— it does not seem to be much use being anything else”).

The great man did, however, come up with a few nice lines about Europe. The “sovereign remedy” to the tragedy of postwar Europe, he said in 1946, was to “re-create the European family … and provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe.”

This would be the only way, Churchill explained, for “hundreds of millions of toilers to be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living”.

Given the circumstances on Monday, Davis may not have felt those lines were appropriate.

