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. But it’s a mistake for one pitching herself as a rigorous thinker, approaching power with the same robustly worked-through theory of the world as Thatcher in the 1970s.
Growth is now Badenoch’s rationale for everything, from scrapping the Environment Agency – accused of being a drag on developers, although that’s precisely what some rural Tory voters like about it – to giving parents earning over £100,000 free childcare (on the grounds that, currently, high earners will cut their working hours rather than lose that nursery place). It’s her defence for some potentially unpopular choices, her alpha and omega. Yet by ignoring the ongoing damage Brexit is doing to trade and GDP, Badenoch is chopping her self-professed growth mission off at the knees.
In her 1976 essay The Right Approach, which Badenoch’s treatise consciously echoes, Margaret Thatcher declared that her party “has always been outward-looking, while concerned with the security, the economic interests and the honour of Britain”, and lambasted Labour’s lack of enthusiasm for the then European Community. The context now is obviously different, but Thatcher in 1976 was still a pragmatist arguing for Europe “to concentrate on what is practical and what is attainable”, where Badenoch in 2026 is an ideologue. The Tory brand remains toxic despite its leader’s relative popularity mostly because voters got sick of endless Brexit-related drama consuming Westminster, while none of the practical benefits materialised. There’s no point dangling policies such as free childcare for bankers over the remain-voting former Tory shires without acknowledging all that. But if she can’t bring herself to do so, then Badenoch’s next best bet is to let Burnham rescue her party from a dead end of its own making.
Though they would never have opened this door, in truth it suits the Tories to let Burnham walk through it, while blaming him for whatever goes wrong. If he can construct some mythical EU deal boosting trade and prosperity while remaining acceptable to an electorate convulsed with anxiety about immigration – a big if – then future governments will owe him. If he can’t, Badenoch can just join the chorus of condemnation. But it’s not in Tory long-term interests to strangle this at birth.
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Readers who couldn’t care less about Tory long-term interests, meanwhile, should care that Europe won’t re-enter tortuous Brexit negotiations until it’s clear they could survive a change of government in Britain. If not a referendum, that means at least tacit cross-party acceptance that the country could do better. Badenoch doesn’t even have to say yes to a rethink. All she has to do, for once, is not say no.
