Above the Palace of Westminster, helicopters growled in the grey sky. Below them, the evacuated streets were silent. On every corner, policemen stood in pairs, machine guns held heavy across their chests.
Arguably it was all a bit over the top, but it is not every day that, in the room next door to a Syria conference full of world leaders, David Davis delivers an hour-long Powerpoint presentation on the implications of Brexit for British business.
Davis is not one for the politics of fear. He is not, despite spending the weekends of his youth on maneuvers with the Territorial Army, a frightening individual, and particularly not when armed with nothing more than a thick collection of graphs.
He didn’t have his own tie. He didn’t have a hashtag. He just had a lengthy dissection of the case for remaining in the EU. This was an entirely economic assessment of why the EU has failed and Britain must leave.
Some of the economics didn’t make any sense, not least the assertion that 421,000 Spanish jobs are dependent on selling €740m (£568m) worth of Spanish fruit to the UK.
That’s about £1,300 per job. Things are bad in Spain, but they’re not that bad yet.
Some of it was deliberately sophistric. “The EU’s growth rate has been a third of the global average,” he claimed, as if the aggregate growth rate of the countries that make up the EU is a meaningful statistic.
Even if you choose to overlook the fact that among the current top 10 countries for highest growth rate includes Turkmenistan, Chad, Sierra Leone and the DR Congo, what matters is the UK’s growth rate, and whether it is helped or hindered by being part of the EU.
But above all, there was no flag waving, no tie wearing, no petty nationalism. David Davies did not want to know Who Will Speak For England.
It was the most sensible contribution to the debate that the Out campaign, in its many forms, is likely to make. And it almost – almost – made sense.
