Sketch: The In Campaign are trying to take you hostage, says Gove, then slams down the car boot and speeds away

“The In campaign treats people like children, unfit to be trusted and easily scared by ghost stories,” the Justice Secretary began. The Leave Campaign by contrast, was “positive and optimistic.” He carried on: “If we vote to stay we are voting to be a hostage locked in the boot of a car.”

In a long speech that carefully stole sound bites from his friend and adversary David Cameron, this was Gove letting sunshine win the day, and locking those who disagree with him in a car boot.

It is the terrifying In campaign that, “Imagines the people of this country are mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night.”

But if we vote to Remain? “The EU’s bosses and bureaucrats will take that as carte blanche to continue taking more power and money away from Britain. Britain had better shut up and suck it up. We are hostages to their agenda.”

Being neither the leader of Ukip like Nigel Farage, nor prone to prawn cocktail crisp-centric fallacy like Boris Johnson, nor near universally considered an idiot like Chris Grayling, Gove is meant to be the Leave campaign’s trump card. His speech on Tuesday morning was meant to set out the positive, nuanced and not explicitly jingoistic case for Brexit.

“The overwhelming majority of countries choose to govern themselves,” he said, which they do. And the overwhelming majority of them, from southeast Asia to central and south America are coming together to form trading blocs to increase their global clout, the shining example of which is the one Gove wants Britain to leave.

“It would not be to boldly go where no man has gone before. It would be to join the vast majority of countries who govern themselves,” he claimed, only slightly overlooking the fact that the UK is overwhelmingly richer than the majority of countries of which he speaks, and it was in a pique of self-governance in 1973 that it chose to join the world’s largest single market, and is now significantly richer on every conceivable indices than when it did so.

“The EU has turned the world’s richest continent into its slowest growing,” came next, a fact so shocking it only partially overlooks that the richest countries in the world are always the slowest growing, and that the fastest growing economies in the world currently belong to Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan, Ethiopia and Chad.

Most intriguing of all, it appears that a vote to leave the EU wouldn’t actually mean we would have to leave the EU.

“The day after we vote to leave we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want,” he said.

Lesser lights in the debate, not least the Prime Minister, have suggested that if Britain has a referendum, and then the British people vote to leave the EU, it would be at least a little bit incumbent upon him to, you know, leave the EU, what with the most potent argument against it being that it is an anti-democratic institution. But this is not the case.

“We can set the pace, and the one thing which won’t change is our ability to trade freely with Europe,” Gove assured.

We must shake off this crushing yoke, holding us back, stifling innovation, crushing our economy, but seriously, there’s no rush. Chill out. Take your time.

All wars of Independence end this way. Britain should understand this better than anyone. When the USA, India, Kenya, Rhodesia and everywhere else in between finally overthrew British Rule, what happened in every single case is that the people rose up in one voice and said, “Seriously? What’s the hurry? Relax. Breathe out. We’ll have independence when we’re good and ready.”

Yes, it costs us £350m a week, money that can be spent on, “NHS, schools, social care, trade missions, Astute class submarines, tax cuts, trade missions,” hoverboards, unicorns and everything else, but not now. In a few years – five, maybe ten.

Because as we all know, what hostage trapped in the boot of a car has ever been in a rush to get out?