Philip Rycroft, the former permanent secretary of the now-defunct Department for Exiting the EU, has made a striking public call: Britain should begin a conversation about rejoining the European Union. Rycroft argued that the promises made during the Brexit campaign — on economics, immigration, and sovereignty — “have not lived up to expectations,” and that a “clear-headed appraisal of what is in the country’s best interests” was overdue.
He acknowledged that any path back into the bloc would be “long and windy,” but maintained that “the argument was there to be won.” His intervention is significant not because of its novelty — polling has shown growing buyer’s remorse among the British public — but because of the messenger: a senior mandarin who was responsible for delivering Brexit itself.
