You are a hopeful for the Labour top job, seeking to replace the Prime Minister’s beta performance, but getting a mixed reception from a shaken party to your dramatic Wesignation.

You need a message to exemplify the difference between you – and the mediocrity of Keir Starmer’s premiership – and draw a contrast with the foggy contours of Andy Burnham’s views.

In the crude algorithm of political positioning, one under-occupied piece of territory lies open to you: pledging to rejoin the European Union. So, Wes Streeting has gone and said it at a conference this weekend, pledging to put the UK back among the yellow stars on the blue EU flag. He wants to “rebuild our economy and trade, and improve our defence against the shared threats from Russian aggression and America First”.

In short: why go for all that faffing about with the detail of numbers in youth mobility schemes with the EU? Why endure painstaking negotiations of electricity, food and agri-product deals, when you could just pledge that via entry to a customs union and “one day” undo the dastardly Brexit, reshape the UK’s fragile economic outlook and erase the inconvenience of the Brexit vote a decade ago?

Such is the inviting Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus – and Streeting is an engaging and entertaining Parnassian on this issue. In a party which is losing votes to the left while under attack on the right from Reform, it is an attempt to choose a clear path. It aims to garner votes among progressive, pro-European voters before the next general election, and isolate Reform and the withering Tories on the right in the hope that it denies them a joint majority.

And as........

© iNews