The only thing Change UK wants to change is the people

At the party’s election launch, it wasn’t even a case of going over the same old Brexit arguments, but resuscitating ancient ones that died long ago

It is not yet 24 hours since I last began a column about Brexit by repeating Donald Tusk’s now two-week-old warning to Britain, to “please, not waste” the extra time we had to ask for and were given. And it is, I fear, unlikely to be a further 24 before I have done so for a third time.

But what choice do they give us, at the end of a day in which the time we do not have has mainly been put to use by a small handful of former Tory and Labour MPs getting together with a few big fish from the very small pond that is the Remain Twitter universe, to dress up as – but definitely not join – the Lib Dems?

Change UK – The Independent Group is officially launched. It’s got two names that don’t make sense, a bit like Britain Stronger in Europe, if you’ve ever heard of it. The new group has got its own Johnson, Rachel this time.

But mainly, and this is the real genius bit, it’s not going to waste time going over the same futile arguments of the last two years, it’s going to go back even further than that, and resuscitate the even older ones that died at dawn, alongside David Cameron’s general dignity, on 24 June 2016.

They were in Bristol, the men and women of Change UK – The Independent Group, which is already emerging as the Cheryl Cole/Tweedy/Fernandez-Versini of British politics, in that each time it troubles the headlines, it does so with a new name.

They were announcing their candidates for the European elections. They’d had more than 3,000 applications, so why wouldn’t they go with, to name but one, Rachel Johnson, so she could then spend most of the morning’s session answering questions about her brother? Because what screams “change” louder than another public round of the Johnson family psychodrama, now best understood as a sort of Real Arsewipes of Berkshire-style semi-scripted reality series exclusive to the rolling news channels?

We also had Gavin Esler, erstwhile BBC man, now Remain Twitter activist. Good on him for getting involved. He was here, we learnt, for three reasons. And they were to “Stop Brexit, Fix Britain and Reform the EU”.

Now, anyone with even the most fleeting interest in politics might, over the past three years, have found themselves alighting on one of the 10,000 or so independent bits of analysis that suggested one of David Cameron’s bigger mistakes, in hindsight, was to try to win a referendum campaign on EU membership by relentlessly slagging off the EU.

“I don’t love Brussels, I love Britain” was always there in the first three sentences of every speech he gave, apart from the one at 8am outside 10 Downing Street, which he’d had to give because the people of Britain had, much to his shock and disappointment, decided they didn’t love Brussels either.

And yet, here was the continuity Remain campaign, still taking the view that the Change-with-a-capital-C the country is crying out for is more meaningless, and ultimately undeliverable promises to reform the European Union.

We would also find out again, what we knew already, that Change UK – The Independent Group would not vote against Theresa May in a confidence vote that might be coming quite soon.

Its MPs want to stop Brexit. They want a people’s vote. But they don’t want a general election that would, in all likelihood, cost them their seats.

It will not be long before they are looking for a third new name. How about “Change the People”?