Oh God, what have I done?

The government has been lying to us, and probably to itself. Half way through a week in which we have seen Theresa May pull out of a Brussels lunch to take a call from her "partner in government" Arlene Foster, then go back in to "withdraw its agreement to its own text" as Justin Webb on the Today programme put it, a week in which David Davis has come out and casually admitted that the preparatory work for Brexit that he's been telling the world about for months simply doesn't exist... what are we to do?

In fact Davis was lying in that casual admission as well. I'm absolutely sure that he's had some top quality civil service minds working on what various flavours of Brexit would do to various parts of the British economy. I'm even ready to believe they've spent time on what would happen to British society in various circumstances. But his overriding objective has been to tell the British people absolutely nothing.

Nothing that would allow us to evaluate the decision we made (or didn't make) on 23 June 2016, nothing that would help us work out how well or badly he and his cronies are doing the job handed to them by a vote which was legally advisory but became politically binding (thanks to Cameron's shallow certainty that it would go his way and May's determination that, even though she still doesn't believe it, it's the mission that God has given her).

Somehow, after all this time...

Keep your cards...

• the Brexit referendum vote was one year, five months and 13 days ago
• May's first speech to a Tory conference as leader, when red lines first appeared, was one year, two months and one day ago
• May sent her letter to trigger the Article 50 process eight months and seven days ago
• then the election she called to strengthen her hand in the Brexit negotiations was five months and 28 days ago
• and the first negotiation, when there still wasn't actually a government, started eleven days later

...close to your chest

...May can still cock up her relationhip with the DUP by not quite getting round to telling them about the text she's managed to agree with Ireland and the EU27's representatives. And Davis is dragged to the DExEU select committee to admit that all this wonderful, heavy-duty work he's been boasting about is stuff they've seen already. In the papers.

I wrote last week about Davis's non-existent impact assessments, but it's worse than even cynics like me thought. The Guardian's Jessica Elgot picked it up last night as MPs and peers filed in and out of the little room where they were allowed to read the precious 800 pages (without taking notes or anything useful like that of course). Their comments as they emerged blinking in disbelief were enough to make you very angry

MPs and peers coming out of the Brexit impact papers reading room today really agitated... "completely ridiculous..." "nothing new..." "patronising"

— Jessica Elgot (@jessicaelgot) December 5, 2017

What they had read was "completely ridiculous",  "nothing new" and "patronising". A peer said "You can't call it a Brexit impact assessment because it makes no assessment of the impact" and an MP told her the information is "stuff sourced to select committee hearings and press releases". A man with a friend in one of the government departments had heard that "the Brexit impact assessments did not exist at the time of parliament's vote to release them".

Starkest of all was "the personal opinion of head of [business] department Greg Clark that releasing a comprehensive and unredacted assessment would stop Brexit". Read the comments yourself, and there's more of the same if you look around.

The man who is representing you and your children in talks with the EU has strung us all along for a year or more. There is nothing for us to see, nothing that we can be allowed to know. He's told us that all of this work exists in excruciating detail (though his ministers admit they've never read it, and the prime minister might only have seen summaries) but it's not there. Not for the likes of us.

If you want to know what's going on, look to the EU. They have access to most of the same information (as have many organisations across the world), and they've been doing our negotiations for the last 40 years (with British staff on board of course, because we were doing it as a collective enterprise).

Now we're setting out on our own we're led by liars and dissemblers, and we can't be trusted with the information that tells us how well (do you believe they wouldn't have published it?) or badly (they didn't) it might turn out.