It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for David Davis. While most of his cabinet colleagues are on an extended sabbatical for the foreseeable future as the government tries to disentangle itself from the EU, the Brexit secretary is being forced to work around the clock.



If it wasn’t bad enough spending most of Tuesday afternoon updating the house on his lack of progress in the Brexit negotiations, he then had to take a double hit on Thursday. First at departmental questions, in which he appeared to be very clear on the things he wasn’t going to do but totally clueless about what he would be doing, then when he had to present the second reading of the government’s EU withdrawal bill.

Understandably, perhaps, the normally quite affable Davis was a little tetchy by the time he made his second appearance at the dispatch box. He began by taking a pop at George Osborne, saying he wasn’t going to take any flak for “ruling by decree” from the editor of the Evening Standard; and when Labour’s Stephen Doughty interrupted to suggest that allocating just two days to the bill’s second reading and eight days to its committee stage was rather taking the piss considering its significance, Davis waved him away with the observation that it all sounded plenty long enough to him.

It was like this, Davis sighed: we were leaving the EU in a matter of months so we needed to bundle decades of EU law into UK law pronto. It was no biggie. The once “great repeal bill” was hurriedly being rewritten as the relatively minor repeal bill as he spoke. And once we’d done all this, we could then get rid of the bits that we didn’t much like at our leisure. Or rather he could get rid of them at his leisure because he didn’t really want parliament to have any say in the process. Not because he didn’t trust MPs not to put a spanner in the works, but because he just wanted to save everyone the hassle. Surely everyone could trust him on this?

Keir Starmer didn’t think he could. The shadow Brexit secretary may not always be the best at thinking on his feet, but he is a very good lawyer. And he was totally in his element as he took apart the bill clause by clause. Clause 9? Hopeless. Clause 7? A shocker. And don’t get him started on clause 17. The kindest interpretation he could come up with was that Davis hadn’t really understood the implications of what he was proposing. No one in their right mind could vote for a bill which contained provision for large chunks of it to be repealed by statutory instruments.

As if on cue, Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood stood up to announce that this was the best bill in the world and exactly what the voters had called for in the referendum. But other Tories weren’t quite so convinced.

Dominic Grieve – another lawyer – observed that he couldn’t remember such a badly drafted bill. Ken Clarke politely observed that the bill could do with some significant amendments and that it would take more than personal assurances from Davis that everything would be all right on the night to make him feel better. After all, the minister could be out of a job in a few months and who knew what his successor might do?

By now it appeared to have dawned even on Davis that the bill was a bit of a shambles and he began to drop heavy hints that he might be prepared to make concessions just so long as he wasn’t humiliated by having it thrown out at the first time of asking. The leader of the house, Andrea Leadsom, was even dispatched to the Speaker’s chair to negotiate an extra two hours of debate on Monday night. Two whole hours! That should see off any complaints that Davis wasn’t a listening kind of guy …

Or not. Hilary Benn, the chair of the Brexit select committee, shook his head. The bill was just so bad that it was unamendable. He and the rest of the Labour party had no option but to vote against the bill on second reading. It was a self-evident truth that the Brexit negotiations were going to end in bitter disappointment and the bill in effect ruled out the possibility of the UK staying in the single market and the customs union during any transitional arrangements. It was a bill that was sending the UK off a cliff edge.

Davis looked surprised. He hadn’t realised that was one of the consequences. He weighed up his options. Back to the drawing board or carry on winging it. Sod it. Wing it every time.