If David Davis has been telling the truth all along, it's time to panic

As Arthur C Clarke said about intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, two frightening scenarios exist:

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

After David Davis's appearance before the Brexit select committee yesterday, I think that the search for intelligent life in the Department for Exiting the European Union yields a similarly terrifying pair of binary options:

1. David Davis is telling the truth now, when he says that the impact studies and analysis don't exist, but he was lying in the past when he said they existed in "excruciating detail"

2. David Davis is lying now, when he says that the impact studies and analysis don't exist, but he was telling the truth in the past when he said they did.

1. is terrifying because it means that the UK is taking the most significant peacetime decision in its history with virtually no planning or risk assessment. 2. is terrifying because the risk assessments exist, but Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union is pretending they don't, presumably because their conclusions are too frightening to share with the public.

I bet they do exist, in some form or other. I bet Davis has decided he'd rather take heat for misleading Parliament and the public than come clean about what Government knows Brexit means. https://t.co/DARDqHtgBF

— Jo Maugham QC (@JolyonMaugham) 6 December 2017

Unfortunately for fans of neat correspondences, and for people who think that surely by now we must have reached rock bottom, a third possibility exists:

3. David Davis is telling the truth now, when he says that the impact studies and analysis don't exist and he was also telling the truth in the past when he said they did.

3. could be true if DExEU did analyse the probable impact, but the results were so horrific that they subsequently destroyed their work and ordered everybody who knew of its existence never to speak of it again. In that case, Davis could then have been technically telling the truth all along, with implications that are even more terrifying than scenarios 1. and 2.

I now think they DID exist and he’s destroyed them.

— Kate Edmonds #BFPE (@kate_edmonds_CS) 6 December 2017

Logically, there's a fourth possibility, that Davis was lying in the past and is lying now, but this one doesn't really make much sense to me. DExEU could have failed to do its homework when Davis was confidently assuring everybody that it was all well in hand, then cobbled something together at the last minute, but if that's true and the work exists, why stand before the committee and pretend that his department hasn't done it? Unless, or course, the conclusions of the department's  last-minute impact studies and analysis were as terrifying as 2., or as utterly horrific as 3.

Whatever the right answer, just be grateful that you're not David Davis. Or, as Monty Python sang:

So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!