NOT unusually, the cartoonist Matt put his finger, or rather his drawing pen, right on it. His pocket cartoon in The Daily Telegraph on the Treasury’s Brexit forecast showed one City gent reading the document and remarking to another: “Apparently, after a no-deal Brexit the only survivors will be cockroaches.”

Yes, the Treasury predicts Armageddon from a no-deal. Medicine shortages. Goods stuck at borders – Kent almost a lorry park. Consumers hit with higher charges for everything from credit cards to ‘low value’ parcels. Even sperm will be in short supply; will our race be in peril?

Matt’s cartoon mirrors the impression that our withdrawal from the EU, by the means provided in its key Treaty of Lisbon, now looks very like war. Survival was easier when we needed warships to shepherd home merchant convoys. The war analogy has been ratcheted up by an astonishing threat by the EU to exclude Britain from its Galileo space programme, developing satellite navigation. Insultingly, the EU claims Britain’s continuing involvement would compromise the EU’s security – an enemy in the camp. But Brexit was never intended to weaken international ventures of this kind. Europol has functioned successfully for decades. But the likelihood of Britain’s banishment from the space programme is serious enough for Theresa May to have ordered a parallel programme just for Britain. With £100m allocated simply to ‘map out’ a system, this is madness. But at least it reveals the petulant, spiteful nature of the EU. Some Remainers might conclude that it will be uplifting for Britain to stand free of such an odious beast.

Meanwhile, it is worth recalling one or two pre-referendum Treasury predictions of the impact of a Brexit. House prices would fall by almost a fifth. In fact they’re up seven per cent. Unemployment would rise by 2.4 per cent. In fact it’s down by almost one per cent, with fewer people jobless than at any time during the last 40 years.

There are more shots where those came from, to answer the Treasury’s guns. The sad thing is those guns seem trained on Britain, alongside those of the EU. But we’ve triumphed against overwhelming odds before and must gird up to do so again.

A CYCLIST acquaintance picked up on my item about Alan Bennett’s TV play, A Day Out. He suggested that a ride to Fountains Abbey and back from Halifax, a round trip of about 70 miles, was rather long for an Edwardian cycling group. True, and I should have made clear that though filming took place in Halifax the town wasn’t identified but served simply as a West Riding mill town.

Coincidental with my piece, Bennett made some remarks on modern comedy. “Mark my words”, he said “when a society has to resort to the lavatory for its humour, the writing is on the wall.”

But Bennett isn’t averse to a little lavatory humour himself. I leave you to judge whether the following lines, parodying John Betjeman on the much-loved poet himself, signal that we are going down the pan:

Here I sit alone and 60,

Bald and fat and full of sin.

Cold the seat and loud the cistern

As I read the Harpic tin.