If you want to know what David Davis really wants for Brexit, take a look inside his office – and weep

If your chosen destination is understanding the pathological delusion that is propelling us to disaster, David Davis’s office decor seems as useful a road map as any.

On the Brexit Secretary’s wall is another map, a Times columnist reminds me. This one points backwards to what Davis regards as a glorious past, not to the miserable future ahead.

It’s a map of 18th century Europe. Now why would a 21st century politician give pride of place to such an artefact?

One explanation is that all the beatings from Michel Barnier have left Davis so punchy that he believes the map is current. In this version, he sits at his desk fretting about the news from Wallachia and Prussia, and dwelling on his prospects of striking a trade deal with the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

The other explanation is that three centuries ago, what with Napoleon defeated and all those glittering possessions across the seas, Great Britain was the pre-eminent European power.

In this version, which starts the odds-on 1-5 favourite, on one level he does appreciate that the map of Europe has changed. But on another, deeper level, his choice of mural decoration betrays the perpetual wonderment of the overgrown post-war schoolboy thrilling to tales of imperial conquest.

In the offices of Liam Fox and Boris Johnson respectively, meanwhile, are said to be statues of those fervent imperial warriors, Cecil Rhodes and (young) Winston Churchill.

If the Three Stooges take strength from such iconography and the promise of a golden tomorrow it represents, they are missing the brutal symmetry.

In the olden days they revere, or so we were taught, the British genius was playing dumb to hide the cleverness. When chaps tootled off to foreign parts, they lulled the locals into taking them for chumps. One minute the natives were chortling at the elaborate red tunics and preposterous hats. The next, they looked round and noticed the buffoons had nicked their country.

Today, the cocky, blustering likes of Davis, Fox and Johnson act smart to cover their idiocy. They and a huge chunk of the party they all wish to lead are yoked to this dementedly anachronistic notion of British supremacy. Like an Alzheimer’s victim, they recall every detail of the distant past in crystal clarity, but have no memory of recent events.

Stumbling into the psychogeriatric ward of national life this week is one Bernard Jenkin. A Maastricht rebel in 1992, Jenkin has spent the ensuing quarter of a century frothing over Brussels like a distempered Yorkie that yaps at the mirror and sees a Rottweiler roaring back.

Although he has bravely evaded the burdens of even the most banal ministerial office (though he does chair a committee), this is one of those backroom-boy Tory bullies who, by dint of longevity and a certain affable swagger, eventually get the epithet “influential Tory backbencher”.

In a bid to influence his leader, Jenkin has nipped out of the shadows to warn Theresa May that if she sacks or demotes Boris, he and his gang of professional intransigents, who live to scream “betrayal!” at every turn, expect her to do the same to Philip Hammond. The Chancellor (or as he euphemised it, “the Treasury”) cannot be trusted on Brexit, he writes, equating what any natural urge to steer the economy clear of the mountain with a treasonous lack of patriotic feeling.

Jenkin also advises May to deliver an ultimatum at next week’s European Council meeting. Time’s up, she should tell the EU. Unless it bends the knee to the British will, we will flounce off without a deal.

Until now, Jenkin’s major contribution to public life has been to inspire Richard Curtis, a friend, to name characters after him. In Blackadder II, Bernard was revealed as the name of the Queen’s deranged sidekick, Nursey. The bridegroom Bernard in Four Weddings And A Funeral was an archetypal good-natured ass.

Yet if our Bernard seems as incidental to the national narrative as that namesake was to the plot of that film, it only seems that way. Negligible as he may be as a politician even by current standards, he is an important paradigm of the granite hard Brexit right. His conceit is surpassed only by his self-delusion. He seems sincerely to believe that Europe needs good trading relations with Britain more than vice versa; that Britain is in a stronger negotiating position than the other 27 countries combined.

Europe, being sane, disagrees. Europe, in fact, is bored to distraction by the drab cocktail of misplaced arrogance, dithering vagueness and mind-bending incompetence this Government is still mixing 15 months after the vote.

The EU isn’t buying the myth that Britain matters. Nor is the US, the senior partner in our new transatlantic confederacy of dunces. Nor is China, which cancelled May’s visit for Trump with the disdain of a talk show host bumping a stale old has-been for a megastar. Beyond that enclave of England that clings to the tragicomic comfort blanket of phantasmal superiority, no one is buying it.

In their bunkers, meanwhile, bathed in the rose-pink hue of Empire, the Stooges have their busts and ancient maps. The best of British to them if they can find inspiration in those. But the only imperial warrior the trio bring to this mind is Lord Cardigan, commander of the Light Brigade, as onward they march the 60,000,000 into the valley of geopolitical death.