I don’t know whether I have mentioned this, but I think that leaving the EU is a stupid idea. All the time I don’t spend working (staring out of a window), I spend campaigning against this stupid idea. And even I cannot get to the end of a paragraph that has the phrase “single market” in it, while the word “amendment” acts like an allergen. Just to overcome this, I henceforth will say “Alton Towers” in place of single market, “wheeze” instead of amendment, and only use first names: if you need to know which Keir and Chuka I mean, I can only assume you’ve found your happy place and you should stay there.

Keir’s wheeze is that we retain access to Alton Towers. We get to go on all the rides, eat from its many snack bars, benefit from its safety protocols, which are not perfect but are better than no safety, and obey its rules. There will be those who grumble that they don’t want to stay in Alton Towers, they want to build a new theme park, and those people are crazy. One week they will tell you the world is lousy with fairground rides at low, low prices; two years later, all they’ve found is some secondhand giant teacups from Cuba. Then there will be people who say: if we’re going to stay in Alton Towers, why can’t we retain our place on the management and create a theme park built for the future, where everything is solar-powered and the snack bars serve vegan fried “chicken”. It would be one where children in low-income families – which, at the rate we’re going, will soon be most children – can get in free. But it is the will of the people that we leave the management committee for, you know, reasons. So OK, Keir’s wheeze is not a bad wheeze.

What is Keir Starmer's 'internal market' Brexit proposal?' Read more

Chuka disagrees with Keir’s wheeze, because the lords have a different one, in which we also remain at Alton Towers, but in an area devised years ago for people who have mixed feelings about theme parks but don’t want to be left out. The Norway family have an Ambivalence Day Pass, and Chuka wants one of those. He reckons Tory rebels will buy the lords’ wheeze, because it’s cross-party, but won’t buy Keir’s, because it comes from Labour’s front bench. This makes no sense, unless we assume that Tory rebels don’t know how parliament works. Whoever they line up behind, the result of their rebellion would be the same: defeat for a fragile government and whatever consequences that brings. It’s not as though the lords represent an alternative opposition, or that MPs must choose between disagreeing with Theresa May and hating Jeremy Corbyn more.

Ah, but does Chuka have a sub-wheeze (using the word for its true meaning on this occasion)? Is he trying to scoop up Tory rebels, filch half the Labour party and emerge, phoenix-like, when the flames of this unending tedium are done, as the leader of a new centrist party? Dastardly, but along with Tony Blair, David Miliband and Peter Mandelson, Chuka is reaching the point where even his most self-evident statements (“Alton Towers is more fun and professionally run than Lapland New Forest”), ring with self-serving expedience. We’re going to end up leaving Alton Towers for a wreck of a place with crappy elves and no Santa for a reason history will be too depressed to relate – just to disagree with Chuka.