The National:

THE Tory hard Brexiteers don't need much help making themselves look ridiculous, but it's happening again.

A while back, we all had a good laugh at Jacob Rees-Mogg's European Research Group naming their elite team of lawyers the "Star Chamber".

READ MORE: ERG have a hilariously appropriate name for their group of lawyers

To quote the dictionary definitions of the Star Chamber: "A former court of inquisitorial and criminal jurisdiction in England that sat without a jury and that became noted for its arbitrary methods and severe punishments, abolished 1641."

Or: "Any tribunal, committee, or the like, which proceeds by arbitrary or unfair methods."

Quite the own goal, right? It's going to be hard to top a nickname like that ... but exactly this has been achieved.

May met a group of hard Brexiteers at Chequers yesterday for crisis talks on Brexit. There were more people called "David" than women on the guest list, some on Twitter noted.

Now, BBC reporter Laura Kuenssberg has revealed that the new name for those daytrippers is "The Grand Wizards".

For all their faults and incompetence, we find it impossible to believe that this group of Tory MPs won't know who that phrase is associated with.

"Grand Wizard" was a title used for the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. 

That is not an association any person should want – and particularly when you're part of a Brexit faction accused of toxic nationalism.

Yet when Kuenssberg cleared things up "for avoidance of doubt", it just raised more questions.

She tweeted: "just catching up on timeline, for avoidance of doubt, couple of insiders told me using the nickname informally, no intended connection to anything else"

Really? What was the intended connection, then? Are we to believe Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and the rest of the gang are just massive fantasy geeks? They do seem like characters out of one, but otherwise, it seems a bit hard to believe.

We're relieved to hear they're only using the name "informally", however. There was us thinking they were using it formally and sending out press releases on behalf of the "Grand Wizards"...