Britain should not rejoin the EU but apply afresh as a new country with no account history

I disagree.

My objection is not to the destination, about which I hold no strong view this week, but to the verb. To rejoin assumes there is something to rejoin. Britain’s membership was opened in 1973, on an entirely different operating system, and closed at 11pm on 31 January 2020. In my experience of library cards, loyalty schemes and a building society passbook I last saw in 1998, accounts left dormant for nearly seven years are not paused. They are deleted.

Consider what reactivation would actually involve. Somebody in the Cabinet Office would have to locate the original login. The password was set in the early 1970s and almost certainly contained no special characters. The recovery address is a fax number. The security questions concern the name of our first pet, which was a cat that died in 2009, and the city in which we were born, which has since been substantially redeveloped.

Then comes verification. Brussels will send a six-digit code to the device on file, which is a BlackBerry in a drawer at the Department for Exiting the European Union, a department that itself no longer exists. The code expires after ten minutes. The drawer has been locked since 2020, and the key was handed to a facilities contractor whose contract was not renewed.

The cleaner course is to apply as a new country. A new country arrives with no legacy data, no rebate history, no browser cookies from 2016 and no saved drafts of anything. It may choose a fresh username. It may, for once in our national life, tick the box confirming that it has read the terms and conditions, and actually have read them.

I accept there is one difficulty. The application form, as I imagine it, ends with Question 14: Please describe, in no more than 200 words, what your country is for. This is precisely the Hotmail problem. Nobody can recover the account because nobody remembers what it was set up to do. I convened a working group of myself this morning to draft an answer, and the leading candidates were queuing, apologising and commentary on the weather, followed closely by having been a member before, which the form explicitly asks us not to mention.

Government insiders are reported to be warning that the prime minister should not expect a smooth ride. Of course he should not. Anyone who has ever clicked Forgot password? knows that the ride is never smooth, that the link leads to another link, and that the final page invites you to contact customer services by post.

I therefore propose that the government stop rejoining forthwith and instead register quietly as a new country, under a slightly different name, from a new email address. And when the form asks whether we have ever applied before, we should do what every Briton does at that question: tick no, and hope very much that the system does not check.