A cunning plan that sounds like Baldrick’s By Patrick Kidd

Do you remember the episode of Blackadder where they had to rewrite Dr Johnson’s dictionary after Baldrick threw it on the fire? Something similar may have been happening in the Department for Exiting the EU since MPs voted for the government to publish all its analysis on Brexit.

Blame David Davis, not that the Brexit secretary showed up to answer an urgent question yesterday on why this amounted to only two folders of material. He was the one who had boasted of how much work has been done on the impact of leaving the EU. There were 58 dossiers filled with “excruciating detail”, Mr Davis said in October. (He originally said there were 57 but this may have been upgraded in case anyone assumed he’d just plucked a figure from the side of a can of Heinz soup.) How was he to know people would want to read them?

When Labour MPs tabled a motion on November 1 for these documents to be made public, the government decided not to vote against it (too risky given some of its backbenchers) and hoped that by ignoring the result the problem would just go away, as it has done with several opposition day motions. Historians will come to describe this as the Ostrich Parliament.

Except it didn’t. Mr Speaker said it was binding. Which is why Robin Walker, a flustered junior minister, was at the dispatch box hoping that if he spoke very quickly no one would notice that he had little to say. The work, he said, was a “widemixof qualitativeandquantitativeanalysis”. It would be “accessibleandinformative”. His lips became a blur. Mr Walker, who represents the Worcester seat that his father, Peter, held for 31 years, was eager to get this over and done with.

Labour was not going to let him. “This is not a game,” Sir Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, told him. All your Brexit analysis in two lever-arch files? Pah! Sir Keir, QC, used to get more paperwork than that for a “pretty routine crown court trial”.

He thought that the government was keeping back all the bad news. Mr Walker disagreed. It’s just important not to publish anything that might undermine our negotiating position, he said. If the French learn that in a DExEU filing cabinet are piles of pages with sentences like “We’re all absolutely [redacted]”, Mr Davis will get such a stuffing he may as well change his name to Bernard Matthews.

Mr Walker insisted that reports had not been censored, merely “collated in a way that does not include sensitive material”. He also explained that the reason it had taken so long to compile was that the information was “not in the right format”. It sounded like an official had been given a bag of scribbled-on fag packets found in Mr Davis’s glove compartment and told to stick them in a couple of folders. “Mr Benson and Dr Hedges advise that . . .”

Hilary Benn, chairman of the Brexit select committee, which was to have received the full dossier, sounded hurt that Mr Davis did not trust his colleagues to keep things secret. Such sweet naivety, shot down by John Whittingdale, the Tory veteran, who observed that “leaks are not without precedent”.

Mr Walker suggested that in time MPs might be allowed to study the documents in a confidential reading room, presumably using cotton gloves to turn the pages and without any means of taking notes. It made it sound like the Book of Kells.

The farce united Europhiles and Brexiteers. Ken Clarke and Jacob Rees-Mogg both observed that the government should never have adopted the ostrich position. If you wanted to suppress information, Mr Clarke said, you should have voted down or amended the Labour motion. Whether he would have joined his party in the lobby to do so was not revealed.