You may have heard the jokes about economists equivocating and squabbling. Ronald Reagan had the best one, about an edition of?Trivial Pursuit designed for economists: “There are 100 questions, 3,000 answers.”

But mainstream economists did not disagree on the EU referendum question. A fortnight before the British public voted by a slim-yet-definite margin to leave the EU, the Centre for Macroeconomics, a research group, polled a group of expert economists, asking them what they thought the overall economic consequences of such a vote would be. The response was unanimous, and the only point of contention was whether Brexit would be bad, or very bad.

Leave voters did not seem to take this unprecedented warning very seriously; nor were they moved when nearly 200 economists signed a letter to the Times; nor were they dissuaded when three of the country’s leading economic institutes issued a sober analysis in a joint statement. All these were independent views, separated from the sometimes-political world of the International Monetary Fund or the Treasury. Yet they were ignored.