IT was hardly the CW McCall spectacular of ‘a thousand screaming trucks crashing the gate at 98'. And there wasn’t even a chartreuse microbus with 11 long-haired friends of Jesus, either.

Instead, the great A30 and M5 Brexit go-slow Convoy was more akin to middle England tootling along at a sedate pace on the road to nowhere.

Possibly as many as 40 vehicles - numbers were difficult to judge - went on a go-slow up the M5, all their drivers miffed at the slow time that the turning wheels of bureaucracy that govern this sceptre’d Isle were taking to sort out Brexit

Just over a dozen spectators, and a smattering of regional media representatives, did their best to line the two foot/cycle bridges over the North-bound carriageway of the M5, just past Junctions 30 and 29.

Sadly, the expected cavalcade on juggernauts did not appear. The traffic flowed, and, after the long delays that had occurred earlier in the day on the A30, the motorway seemed to behave just like a normal Friday evening. As one one bridge-bound spectator commented, once the mobile monolith had passed by: ‘I feel suitably underwhelmed’.

They were, however, treated to a perfect display of how-to-manage-a-rolling-roadblock by Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s finest traffic officers who shepherded the mix of cars and light vans up the the M5.