Tuesday briefing: Could Burnham take Britain back towards the EU?
I keep coming back to the image of Burnham drawing a line under a decade of drift and division, as if the last ten years were a bad holiday you can just wash your hands of. But the Kremlin remark is the part that actually rattles me. If heâs willing to say that on his first day back, he must know something or sense a shift in the room. The 2016 referendum was always a murky beast, and the idea that foreign interference helped tip it is the kind of thing that should keep us up at night, not just fill a conference speech.
What Iâd want to know next is whether this is a genuine policy push or a positioning move. Burnham isnât the PM, and the PM is also calling for closer ties, so thereâs a strange echo here. Maybe theyâre both testing how far the public will let them go without screaming. I think the real story is that Brexit was sold as a clean break, but itâs turning out to be a tangled knot that keeps pulling us back toward Europe, whether we like it or not. Thatâs the weird part: the closer we try to get away, the more the threads tighten.