𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

Being a backbench MP may be one of the worst jobs in Parliament. Your party won the election, but from the back of the class you have next to no say in what goes on. There is, however, one useful service a backbencher can perform. He can roll the pitch for the Government.

That, I suspect, is exactly what Chris Ward was doing when he took to the pages of The Guardian on Monday. Mr Ward, as he is keen to point out, is not just your ordinary backbencher. No, no, he was Starmer’s man when Sir Keir was Shadow Brexit Secretary, don’t you know?

And it was he who co-wrote the Brexit red lines in Labour’s 2024 manifesto: no rejoining the EU, no single market, no customs union, no return to freedom of movement.

Now their author says they should be pensioned off (given a “dignified retirement”) by the next General Election.

More revealing is his explanation of why they existed at all. The red lines, he wrote, were “designed precisely to close down the debate and to narrow the target” Brexit had become for Labour.

It might be one of the more honest statements made by a politician in recent years, a clear admission that a pledge in a manifesto was not a matter of principle but rather a tool to get through an election.

He is of course not alone; Remainers travel in packs. Several MPs have now suggested the time is right for Andy Burnham to consider sacking off the Brexit vote and Rejoin.

The pitch is being prepared, one roller at a time, and the man at the crease is ready.

Mr Burnham, the regular ordinary bloke who became our Prime Minister in July, has said he wants Britain back in the EU in his lifetime, while insisting he is “not proposing any changes in this Parliament”.

He has called for an “honest discussion” about free movement and has said a single market option could go in a Labour manifesto.

Soon he will sign a deal, about which we know remarkably little, with his suitors in Brussels.

Mr Burnham has promised that every policy must pass his “Makerfield test”, aka: it must improve life in the Leave-voting seat he now represents.

Yet polling, which suggests his own constituents want laws made here, not in the EU, suggests his plans fail that test.

To be fair to Mr Ward, his case is not entirely frivolous. He argues that Britain can no longer rely on America, which is itself a serious point in a dangerous world.

But Britain can stand shoulder to shoulder with France and Poland without letting Brussels write its food standards or decide who settles here. Membership of NATO never required the single market.

The danger is not one MP’s article. It is what it tells us about the last manifesto – and the next one.

A red line with a retirement date was never a red line. It was a sales pitch. And the sale, it seems, is nearly closed.