Are Frost and Hannan hellbent on going back into the EU?
The revolution, they say, devours its own children. And now we can report that the Brexiteers are turning on a pair of sopping wet Remoaners discovered lurking within their own ranks… David Frost and Daniel Hannan!
The pair have surprised colleagues by remaining sanguine about the UK possibly joining the Pan-Euro-Mediterranean Convention (Pem), a tariff-free trading scheme which harmonises rules of origin within the EU and beyond to make it easier to export goods.
The UK's joining was mooted last week by the EU trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, who said Brussels would be open to the move, with chancellor Rachel Reeves saying she was 'happy' to look at any proposal to improve trade between Britain and the bloc.
The proposal has sparked predictable fury among many senior Brexiteers – Nigel Farage described it as 'self-destructive' while shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel wrote in the Daily Express that it meant Keir Starmer was 'hellbent on dragging us back in [to the EU] through the back door' and that Labour was 'pursing [sic] with ideological gusto their determined plan to reverse our Brexit freedoms'.
But others are more relaxed. Frost, Boris Johnson's Brexit negotiator who has spent the interim years rubbishing his own work, has said: 'We didn't see it as raising any issue of principle, but we equally didn't consider it to be particularly in UK interests.' It did not, though, he claimed, cut through any of the Conservative red lines.
Hannan, the self-styled 'brains of Brexit' who campaigned for the hardest departure possible, has also said he had no objection, writing in the Times today that 'I find myself disconcerted by the purity spiral that has led fellow Eurosceptics into a mindless dismissal of anything with 'Euro' in the title'.
'Freer trade, even if only marginally freer, is a good thing,' he writes. 'If the EU wants this scheme, should we not at least see what it is prepared to offer in exchange? This shouldn't need spelling out, but Brexit was about democracy, not isolation.'
And even GB News, in its online report, was forced to concede that 'trade experts have supported this assessment, indicating the deal would not amount to a fundamental realignment of the UK's trading relationship with the EU.'
What is it about 17.4 million voters that they don't understand? You lost – get over it!
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