Staged

The rise and fall of this country's hardline Brexiteers may be bracketed by two images. The first - that bus slogan. The second - the ERG press conference in the Upper Room of the Emmanuel Centre, Marsham Street, chaired by Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Whatever talent this lot had for PR deserted them entirely that day. Brexiteers were, we thought, plain-speaking, business-orientated, loyalists, fed up with traditional politics. It was all obvious common sense, and bright 'bad-boys', like Bojo, Arron Banks, Andy Wigmore and Raheem Kassan piled in behind Farage, and took economic validation of their strategy from Shankar Singham, rather than answer difficult questions directly. Only dangerous idiots could argue against "Take back control", eh ?

However on 20th November, assembled against the background of a "Global Britain" logo, a giant screen, and a huge brick vault, Jacob Rees-Mogg sat in the centre of six white elderly men, at a blue baize table. It looked like a praesidium. The Mogg voice echoed echoed around the hard acoustics, as he made his points with slow, chopping hand movements.

We had David Davis (Territorial Army and Warwick University), 69; John Mills (Glenalmond College and Merton, Oxford, founder of JML, selling pots and pans on tv) 80;  Lord (Peter) Lilley (Dulwich College and Clare Cambridge) 75; Sir David Ord (University College, London, co-owner of the Bristol Port Company)70; Hans Maessen, from a Dutch import-export company, now making money from customs software 'solutions'; and Simon Boyd, MD of REIDsteel, which specialises in building stadiums - from the Holte End at Aston Villa, to the Rockingham Speedway Stadium.

They may have been there to provide a breadth of unarguable specialist expertise, but they looked an Orwellian Senate. If it walks like a duck....