It was back to the future in the House of Commons today. After their weeks of backslapping and self-delusion, MPs were back in parliament and indulging in a full-blown nostalgia overload. That’s right – traumatic for those of us who had to report on it and downright tedious for everyone else – the Brexit wars were back.
Burnham had spent the last week focused on foreign affairs, including a trip to the UN. But he’d also found time to go on the Rest is Politics podcast for a cosy fireside chat with the Lord Haw Haw and Tokyo Rose of Centrist Broadcasting Delusion. Brexit has been an absolute godsend for Campbell and Rory Stewart, enabling them to whitewash their reputations as a monster and a wet respectively and create a sort of Year Zero approach to British politics post-2016. Burnham stumbled head over heels into this conceit and ended up blathering about Russian interference in the Brexit referendum.
Unsurprisingly this has provoked some questions and so the Prime Minister had come to the House to sort of address them. I say ‘sort of’, as Burnham didn’t go as far as to repeat his claims about Brexit or Russia to the House (presumably because they aren’t true). Instead he tried to claim he was actually worried about security for farmers and migration (firsts for a Labour leader if so), then made generic claims about Russian intelligence efforts and repeated the long-standing Labour trope that the Tories’ Brexit deal was a bad one.
This could well be true but Burnham faced two problems in saying so: the first was that, as Mrs Badenoch pointed out in her reply, by laying out his plans he had already shown the EU his full negotiating strategy. As she elucidated this he sat silently with a scowl, like a child who, having absolutely sworn blind that it didn’t need the toilet before setting off has now realised, 20 minutes into a long car journey, that nature is about to call. Burnham likes to give the vague illusion of competence. But it’s worth remembering that his actual track record consists mostly of minor changes to tram fares. Not, I suspect, for the last time, you got the impression he’d rather be talking about Rich Tea vs Mini Cheddars than actually thrashing out policy, mostly because he isn’t very good at it.
The second was that the idea that Labour will do a better job has been so comprehensively disproved by the last two years as to now be laughable. The Tories may not have covered themselves in glory during their negotiations, but suggesting that the steely bureaucratic psychopaths who run the EU would look at Ed Miliband and think he was anything other than a rather strange-looking hors d’oeuvre is for the birds.
Mrs Badenoch’s approach was partly to point out the naïveté of the above but also to try and make the PM see that the thing most likely to destabilise what he claimed was Britain’s new role on the world stage was a series of mistakes at the Budget which would signal our inability to spend properly on defence. These efforts fell on deaf ears. Sir Edward Leigh begged the Prime Minister not to reopen Brexit. Labour MP for Pendle and Clitheroe Jonathan Hinder urged Burnham to confirm that any new deal would not involve a return to free movement, with little success. Dame Emily Thornberry licked her lips with glee as it was confirmed that her Commons committee would have oversight of a new ‘foreign disinformation’ task force.
Once more the PM found himself a prisoner of his own earlier remarks. Spelthorne MP Lincoln Jopp pointed out that the PM’s insistence today that ‘our resolve to defend ourselves is absolute’ contradicted his recent PMQs claim that ‘national security cannot come at the expense of social security’. Which was true? Burnham insisted he’d been speaking about social security ‘in the broadest possible sense’, and that ‘resilience builds from the community level up’ – as if Motability cars were after all a form of military spending. He smirked all the way through this bit of politico-waffle, as people do when they know they’ve been caught out. As ever with Burnham, the soundbite didn’t quite match reality.
Sir Ed Davey, very much the Ralph Wiggum of contemporary politics, wanted people to know that he was helping
Sir Ed Davey, very much the Ralph Wiggum of contemporary politics, wanted people to know that he was helping and so launched a profuse speech of praise for Burnham’s stance. He even invited Burnham to provide the evidence for a deep-state Russian conspiracy on Brexit to the House. Most people would challenge Burnham to do this because they are dubious that such evidence exists and suspect that the PM has overplayed his hand. Davey presumably did it because he is credulous enough to engage with all the Middle Class Tin Hattery which has rotted the brains of so many of his core vote, for whom Brexit was the first time in their intensely entitled political existences that they didn’t get their own way and so they drew the natural conclusion that there must be a conspiracy.
Burnham isn’t so stupid as to not realise that slobbering praise from the High King of Middle England smuggery will go down like cold sick in Labour’s working-class seats, many of which they scarcely won back in 2024 and only then because people hated the Tories so much. The Prime Minister cautiously thanked Sir Ed and claimed his change in approach was ‘not ideological but pragmatic’ and reiterated that he was ‘not prepared to revisit red lines’. As at so many occasions over the last decade, it looks like those who are most obsessively in favour of greater European integration will, by sheer obnoxiousness, be the ones to derail it.
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