Up in arms over increasing calls within Labour for the UK to boost its flagging growth by joining a customs union with the EU, Kemi Badenoch has unburdened herself in the pages of the Daily Mail.
“Leaving the EU but joining a customs union is like throwing away the burger and eating the napkin, said the Conservative peer Lord Hannan,” she wrote. “He’s right.”
Leaving aside that Lord Hannan has never been right about anything, the analogy makes no sense whatsoever. Most people would consider throwing away a burger a foolhardy move – as indeed Brexit was. But as one of its most consistently loud supporters, Hannan thinks it, and thus the disposal of the burger, to be a triumph, surely?
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Brexit/burger comparisons are a favourite of Hannan’s. Back in 2018, as Brexit was tearing the country apart, the peer was writing in the pages of the Mail that “staying in the customs union is not a middle way. It is not like having a medium burger because 52 per cent of voters wanted it well done and 48 per cent wanted it rare.”
So pleased is he with his burger and napkin analogy he’s repeated it constantly over the years, using it numerous times on X, in comment pieces for the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail last year, on Newsnight, in speeches to the European Parliament and Bow Group and in an interview with LBC as far back as seven years ago.
Yet not everyone is as impressed as Badenoch. Among the responses to her post approvingly quoting Hannan were “So why not keep the burger, and use the napkin as a napkin?”, “Badenoch helped throw away the burger in 2020”, “I’m glad we agree. Let’s GET THE BURGER BACK!” and “So by your own admission and the opinion of Daniel Hannan, the burger/EU membership was great but we threw it away?”
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