BORIS has an unerring instinct for putting the cat amongst the pigeons. Yet he does so, in my view, for the best of all possible reasons, namely to advance matters in which he believes.

He argues that we must not be brow-beaten by the EU negotiators into paying £10 billion a year after we leave in order to secure access to the single market. The fact is that the UK’s visible trade deficit with the EU was £89 billion in 2015 (ie, we imported £89 billion more from them than we exported to them). The trade deficit with Germany alone was £31 billion. So why should we be forced to buy our way into a trading deal which so massively benefits the people from whom we are buying goods? It would be more logical if they paid us £10 billion rather than vice-versa.

Boris’s article was about more than that, though. He is right to believe that we must get away from our insistently negative approach to Brexit. You hear it from the BBC all the time. “Record low unemployment figures announced this morning despite Brexit.”

Those who love the EU have relied on Project Fear from the start. Do you remember their threats to have an emergency budget, and their gloomy prognostications that the Stock Exchange would collapse, every family would have to pay thousands extra, and there would be general disaster all round?

Well, I am sorry to disappoint them, but the fact is that the economy has never been stronger. The Stock Exchange is trading at a record high, inward investment is booming, unemployment is close to its lowest in real terms since records began.

Since 2010, three million more people have got jobs, and more young people and more women are employed than ever before. There are 32.14 million of us employed, or 75.3 per cent of the population; unemployment is at 4.3 per cent. Here in North Wiltshire there were 510 people unemployed (mainly between jobs), at 1.1 per cent of the economically active population, one of the best of any constituency in Britain.

It is high time that we stopped approaching Brexit in such a negative way, and as Boris enjoined us start to look forward to the great economic and other advantages which it will bring to our country. I hope that the Prime Minister’s speech tomorrow will do just that, and that it will be reported positively by the media.

Boris, of course, is just back from a mission to the British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean devastated by Hurricane Irma. He joins me in paying special tribute to the volunteers, many of them from this area who have, through a Yate, South Gloucestershire organisation called SARAID (Search and Rescue Assistance in Disasters) been helping out in all sorts of ways.

It is that spirit of volunteering, of concern for our former colonies, of determination to play a bigger role in the world which is so typical of we Brits, and we should venerate it, and thank and congratulate those brave people giving up their time and risking their safety to help out people in greater need than us. Britain can play a great role in the wider world. SARAID shows us one way we can do that.