“You all heard of a Brexit tackle? It’s the phrase kids use on the football pitch when a player gets wiped out by someone who’s lost their head a bit.”

This was among the highlights of a speech from Minister for the Constitution and European Union Relations Nick Thomas-Symonds on Wednesday at The Spectator in London.

His address was perhaps surprisingly robust. Then again, it did come as arch-Brexiter and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was continuing to bang the anti-European drum noisily.

Labour has seemed a bit too shy when it has come to making a noise about its efforts for a closer relationship with the EU, seemingly for fear of upsetting Brexit voters who swept Boris Johnson to victory in the December 2019 election.

However, you could surely make an argument that Labour would be wise to highlight its different view on Europe to that of Reform UK and the Tory arch-Brexiters. After all, its seeming timidity to talk too much about Europe and Brexit does not seem to have done it any favours in the opinion polls so far, and in terms of appealing to the Leavers there is no way it is going to outdo the rhetoric of Farage and co.

There were quite a few other highlights in Mr Thomas-Symonds’s speech.

Reflecting on the run-up to the Brexit deal with the EU agreed by the Johnson administration, Mr Thomas-Symonds declared: “Some leaders never grasped the consequences of the route they took…

“The result was the first free trade agreement in history that made it harder to trade.”

It should be noted that it made it much, much harder to trade.

If anyone was in any doubt about the scale of the benefits of frictionless trade with the EU that the UK........

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