With Boris Johnson still under pressure from 'partygate', the government has started talking about Brexit again. Their new slogan? "Brexit opportunities"!
So in the recent mini-reshuffle Jacob Rees-Mogg was appointed to the newly-created office of Minister for Brexit Opportunities. A very laid back job, of course, since there are none...
So far Rees-Mogg's only idea for this role has been to write a column in the Sun 'newspaper' where he invited its readers to email him if they have spotted any EU regulations they would like to abolish. (How many Sun readers do you think could name a single EU regulation?)
This approach shows that the Tories have no idea what to do with their supposed Brexit "freedoms", as further evidenced by the government report titled "The Benefits of Brexit".
The "our achievements so far" section of this document is a desperately padded-out set of bullet points including "reintroduced our iconic blue passports" (yuck, and could have been done in the EU anyway) and "enabling businesses to use a crown stamp symbol on pint glasses" – which were also never banned by the EU.
The latest figures show that UK exports to the EU have fallen by £20 billion since Brexit. Those are some expensive passports and pint glasses.
Still, at least one plucky Tory MP has spotted what she calls a "Brexit dividend": Natalie Elphicke, MP for Dover, has hailed 650 new jobs in her constituency... inspecting border paperwork.
