The prime minister took Britain back to a place no one wanted to go with his claim it was ‘inconceivable’ that Russia had not interfered in Brexit
By Tom Peck, Parliamentary Sketch Writer
The Times – 13 October 2026
Andy Burnham’s favourite soundbite is that he believes in “problem-solving, not point-scoring”, so he may wish to turn his vast problem-solving skills on the growing problem that he absolutely cannot stop point-scoring. Last week he appeared on The Rest Is Politics podcast, where he repeated his favourite self-referential bon mot, that he is a problem-solver not a point-scorer, and then, for reasons only he can know, went on to claim that it was “inconceivable” that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 referendum on Brexit.
Why did he say it? What problem does it solve? On Monday afternoon the prime minister came to the House of Commons to give an update on his not-all-that-recent visit to the United Nations general assembly. In a shock to absolutely no one, it took barely minutes for the occasion to descend into a three-hour point-scoring session about Brexit, in which absolutely no problems were solved.
The prime minister repeated his view that it is a matter of public record that Russia sought to interfere in the 2019 general election, and that it is therefore inconceivable that it did not also seek to interfere in Brexit. And so, with dreary inevitability, Kemi Badenoch had little choice but to point out how, in 2018, the head of MI5 concluded there was no evidence that Russia influenced the EU referendum result.
Sir Julian Lewis, the former head of the defence select committee, invited the prime minister to
“explain how he thinks Russia was able to alter the result of the referendum”.
Badenoch and Lewis received the same world-weary shake of the head. Burnham invited them both to “listen again” to his comments on the podcast, as if one listen were not already one too many. At no point had he said they’d influenced the “result”. He’d merely said they had tried to interfere.
He had, in other words, never said there was a problem. He’d just been trying to do a bit of point-scoring, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what the point was meant to be.
It’s also inconceivable, is it not, that the US did not seek to influence the Brexit referendum. Mainly that happened when President Obama flew to London, stood next to David Cameron, and told British voters that if they voted for Brexit they’d go “to the back of the queue” for any kind of trade deal. […]