We have a long way to go if we’re ever to reach this mythical post-Brexit business paradise

At first, I thought it was a joke. A friend had sent me an extract from a decade-old book predicting what Britain would be like in 2020. In it, Sheila Jones “runs a successful small business, Gentle Breezes, in Birmingham. Over the past 12 months, it has expanded and taken on two new members of staff. Unlike a few years ago, the paperwork that went with this has not proved such a major irritant. There is a very good reason for this. The amount of red tape choking business in Britain has gone down.”

The book is called Ten Years On – Britain Without The European Union and was published in 2009. It’s not meant to be funny. It was a serious work by Dr Lee Rotherham, the Brexit adviser and campaigner, with a foreword by the political journalist, Trevor Kavanagh, and an epilogue by Frederick Forsyth.