Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

David Davis is heading for a tragic failure of his own making

Stephen Bush of the New Statesman asked a good question the other day. Why do people who hate what Boris Johnson and Liam Fox are doing to Britain go easy on David Davis?

He’s right to be perplexed. It turns out all those trade deals the leave campaign promised can’t be done for years. Liam Fox has nothing to do except be a public nuisance, which now I come to think of it is the only post he’s qualified to fill. Johnson meanwhile is an embarrassment, even to an administration which seems beyond shame, and Theresa May does her best to keep him locked in an FCO cellar.

Davis, on the other hand, is Britain’s chief negotiator, and as such is the most important politician in the country today. Yet he receives little of the abuse directed at his colleagues. The political answer to the apparent conundrum is that Davis won admirers across the political spectrum because of his honourable career fighting for civil liberties, regardless of the cost to his own career in the Conservative party.

That’s true, but it misses the basic point that David Davis is a decent man, while to my mind Johnson, Fox and the rest of the gang are not. If you went to speak to Davis in a bar, he would be interested in you and you would be interested in him. By contrast Johnson wouldn’t speak to you unless you could help his career, while a faint but unmistakeable whiff of sleaziness would drive you from the side of Dr Fox.

There is no contradiction between Davis’s love of civil liberties and opposition to the EU. I’m guessing he doesn’t much care for phrases like ‘civil liberties or ‘human rights’. When he made a stand against, say, detention without trial he was defending Britain’s traditional liberties – the rights of freeborn Englishmen, as we used to say when women were second-class citizens.

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