As consumer confidence slumps, it's clear Britons weren't buying the Brexiteers' pitch even before Carney's dire warning

"Project hysteria,” screamed the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Express, in response to the bleak Brexit scenario put forward by the Bank of England’s Governor Mark Carney.

You have here hard right wing newspapers vs the governor of two central banks (Carney ran Canada’s before joining the Bank of England), who is also a former minister, and an alumnus of Oxford and Harvard.

Faced with a choice between the two, I know who I believe. But whom does the Mr and Ms Average Briton believe? That’s the more important question.

According to the latest data on consumer confidence put out by the Centre for Economics & Business Research (CEBR) and YouGov, it seems they too are increasingly disinclined to believe the ‘it’ll be alright and the fears are over done’ mantra they’re reading in the papers and hearing from the Brexiteer ultras.

The headline number put out by the pair as part of their series has declined to its lowest level in a year amid Brexit uncertainty.

Now I’m not going to kid you here. The figure is still over 100, which means consumers are, "more confident than unconfident".

But it fell by 1.4 points in November to 106.7 now, leaving it below where it was before the UK voted Leave in the tainted EU referendum (Russian money, dodgy claims).

It is also only the third time it has been below 107 since that time.

For the record, YouGov collects consumer confidence data every day, conducting more than 6,000 interviews a month for the series. Respondents are asked about household finances, property prices, job security and business activity over the preceding 30 days and looking ahead 12 months.

Another important fact to note from the results is that seven of the eight measures taken declined in November. They included people's perception of their job security over the past 30 days (it recorded the biggest fall since march) and job security over the coming 12 months (biggest fall since May).

Both household finance metrics also took a hit. The backward-looking measure declined by its greatest amount since December 2017, the forward-looking one since last November. Only expected property values over the coming year showed improvement.

Set against that, the next one should make for interesting reading because here’s the sting in the tail: The data was collated before the Government was forced to admit that Britain will be poorer under every Brexit scenario. It was also recorded before Mr Carney warned that less than half of businesses have instituted no deal contingency plans, while predicting an economic slump in the event of the chaotic no deal some Tories clearly want, and are angling for. Prime Minister Theresa May has also threatened it, when what she should do is consult the British people.

There is a feeling amongst those in business and economics, and especially in retail where they’re desperately after some optimism, that the British consumer will still spend over Christmas, because the British consumer always spends over Christmas.

One last blast before it all gets messy? It’s possible.

But I wouldn't bank on it. When it comes to the future it seems the consumer was starting to lean towards Mr Carney’s view before he’d even stated it.