There’s no way on earth it should have worked, but somehow he may have got away with it. Last week, the actor Richard E Grant became the first contestant on The Traitors – a show whose only unbreakable rule is never to let anyone know you’re the murderer – to gleefully announce within minutes of being selected that yes, haha, it’s him! Yet even then many of his fellow contestants seemed to like him too much to recoil.
And that, roughly speaking, is now Andy Burnham’s Brexit strategy. After years of Labour politicians – not least Burnham himself, in the Makerfield byelection, without which he would not now be prime minister – trying to hide their real feelings about Brexit, Burnham has decided just to tell the truth and hope people roll with it. Leaving hasn’t worked, he said bluntly last week in Liverpool, and Britain should consider the alternatives.
If you’re a leaver who suspects him of being out to unwind Brexit – well, yes, he is. This bold strategy seemingly surprised much of his own cabinet, an early lesson in how he likes to work for those who hadn’t studied his Manchester operation closely enough. But the oddly muted initial response to what would once have been a seismic shock suggests it’s wrongfooting some opponents, too.
Nigel Farage has been the only one to react with unfettered glee. Reform’s next manifesto is basically now written for him: save Brexit, stop the boats and don’t vote for Restore because it can’t win. Things are more complicated for the Lib Dems and Greens, who, having pitched themselves as the only real pro-Europeans on the left, are now stuck with trying to take credit for pushing Labour into doing the right thing.
But it’s the party currently holding its conference in Birmingham that faces the most interesting dilemma. Kemi Badenoch doesn’t mention Brexit much these days – only elected after the referendum, she seems to regard the generational Conservative trauma of that period as history now – and it gets only brief mentions in The Right Way, the 95-page personal essay she says would form the bedrock of a Tory government. In his platform speech on Monday, the shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, chose to focus on accusing Burnham of supposedly dragging Britain back to the 1970s, rather than back to 2015.
On this they echo much of what’s left of the Tory vote, who are more interested in tax, the costs of doing business, small boats and what exactly Labour has against labradors in pubs than in relitigating the Brexit deal. Yet the Conservatives are still promising to reverse any Labour unravelling of Brexit, regardless of how that affects the economic growth Badenoch simultaneously insists is everything to her. It makes no intellectual sense, which arguably didn’t bother previous Tory leaders.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
