Burnham Digs Up Brexit, Insists It Is Still Warm

Andy Burnham has returned to the House of Commons with the Brexit argument held above his head like a trophy carp, announcing that the status quo is not good enough for Britain and that the British public will be the boss of whatever is decided, which is the sort of promotion you give someone instead of a pay rise.

The Prime Minister wants to deepen the relationship with the EU at a summit in Brussels on 20 November, with short term wins on youth mobility, food and drink, and energy. He has also floated an in-out referendum in the next manifesto, so that a country which has spent a decade recovering can be invited back into the water to see whether it drowns the same way twice.

He has done it twice now, once at conference and once in the Commons, in the manner of a man who has found one photograph from a holiday and will be showing it to every single person in the building. Kemi Badenoch said it risked regurgitating yesterday's arguments. Nigel Farage called him a liar. Boris Johnson said he had asked a similar question years ago and been told something different, which in Westminster counts as a fact check.

In the Commons his position was that it was inconceivable Russia did not try to interfere, a sentence with so many negatives in it that by the end of it nobody could remember what he was not saying about whom. On a podcast, which is where a Prime Minister goes when he wants to be believed slightly less, he had been more definite.

What he is actually doing is lowering a bucket into a well everyone agreed to brick over, and hauling up the same water, and telling us it has notes of elderflower. The politics are obvious enough: there are votes out there belonging to people who still own a tote bag with a flag of stars on it, and he intends to go round their houses personally.

A hard rain of op-eds is now forecast until roughly March. Britain, which had only just stopped having the dream, has been woken up and asked whether it would like to have the dream again, as a nation, together, at some point before the next election.