Andy Burnham should reconsider calling a snap general election and make undoing Brexit the centrepiece of the campaign, a former Labour government adviser has said.

Mr Burnham tried to “knock dead” the idea of going to the polls early in interviews on the eve of the annual Labour party conference.

But Ben Judah, a special adviser to David Lammy in the Foreign Office until earlier this year, believes the prime minister could pull off an election victory to rival Boris Johnson’s in 2019 if he seized the moment on Europe.

Failing to act now risked repeating the mistakes of Keir Starmer’s government – putting off the question of Europe until it was too late to secure the economic and political benefits, he warned.

His appeal came as Mr Burnham arrived for the party conference in Liverpool promising a “new direction” after a decade since Brexit, strongly hinting that he is willing to rethink the settlement with the EU just days after he failed to rule out putting rejoin in the next election manifesto..

“We have had a decade since Brexit, and it has been a decade of too much drift and too much division. We need to draw a line on that,” Mr Burnham told supporters at the M&S Arena.

“We need to set out a new direction for the country and I will set that out on Tuesday. From that comes the hope. People able to have hope again that things will improve, that life will get better, and it will.”

Mr Judah said the PM should rethink his position and capitalise on public support for rejoining – now at its highest level since the Brexit referendum 10 years ago – and call an election.

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While a major YouGov poll released on Thursday suggested the UK was heading for a hung Parliament, Mr Judah claimed a new, bold strategy to reverse Brexit could take Mr Burnham to the kind of handsome victory Mr Johnson achieved in 2019.

The ex-Tory PM famously won an 80-seat majority when he called a snap election with the promise to “Get Brexit Done”.

In an interview with for the campaign, Mr Judah said: “I think he can pull off a kind of reverse Johnson, and I think that the key thing is to make rejoining the European Union the ultimate objective.”

Pledging to reverse Brexit would allow Labour to appeal to many voters currently backing other parties, he said.

When the party starts making the argument for Europe “more people will come to Labour,” he said, including “a lot of people who are voting Lib Dem, a lot of people who are voting Green, and a lot of people who are voting Tory because their main concern is the economy.” “I think Labour can win a majority,” he added.

The call comes after Mr Burnham, in response to a question from , left the door open to pledging to rejoin the EU in Labour's next manifesto.

With momentum building to reverse Brexit, a major Labour Movement for Europe rally is set to take place at the party conference on Sunday with foreign secretary Ed Miliband addressing rejoiners.

Former Labour PM Sir Tony Blair has also told Mr Burnham that Britain should commit to re-entering the EU within the next 10 years, calling for a “new approach” to post-Brexit ties.

A series of economic data reports has continued to reveal the ongoing harms of Brexit including the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) showing a loss of £6.5bn a year in exports through a lack of mutual recognition with the EU.

Mr Judah claims that making the pledge and calling a snap election would also allow Mr Burnham to delay what will be a difficult Budget next month, he said.

And victory would ease pressure on future Budgets, by reassuring the markets Britain has a plan for economic growth that would allow them to cut the huge amount the government currently has to pay on its debt.

“If the markets believed that we were going back into the European Union, and we had a plan to do so, and we were going to, before that, get back into the single market, get that trade going up, our gilts would go down, and our debt interest would go down,” he said.

“And that would mean that we would not have to go through this whole sequence of horrible Budgets. Of discovering that there's less headroom and that we've got to tax and chop and cut more here, there and everywhere.”

However, rejoining should be a multi-step process, he suggested.

Once Labour had declared that its ultimate aim was to be part of the bloc again, then it could “really explain to voters that we stand no chance of reindustrializing the country and passing the prime minister's ‘Makerfield’ test without access to the European single market, the loss of which has been so badly felt by our manufacturing sector.

But he said the government could also “meet the voters where they are on that first step” back.

“Now, that first step could be they want to go back into the customs union or the single market, or they want to go back fully straight away. But I think it should be in two stages.”

He warned that without the pledge, Mr Burnham risked making some of the mistakes of the Starmer government, to which he had a front row seat.

“I'm quite frightened that we could see history repeat itself in the Burnham government, like it did in the Starmer government,” he said.

“Of Europe being filed in the ‘too difficult’ box. The government then going through a horrific Budget, finding that the only way to make the economy really crank up and grow again in a way that makes sense for a political party with an electoral calendar is to try and deepen our relationship with Europe.

“And to only start talking about that when it's much too late diplomatically and politically, and their authority has been shot.”

There were, he added, “some bad trends building up for Labour. The first is that I think that Burnham’s popularity right now is probably peaking….

“It's going to be a very difficult Budget. It's going to be a very difficult winter. Geopolitics is getting worse. We've got two more years of Donald Trump and everything that means. We know that the MPs and the public mood are frit and worried and authority has been draining away from prime ministers quickly.

“Burnham needs to do something to lock in his coalition and to rally and unite the left even further. He's made a promising start. He can really go much farther by breaking glass on Europe.”

He said it was not that the strategy was without risks.

But, he said, “my view is that the risks of not doing so are in fact greater. Because if we wait and don't do anything, there are so many bad trends incoming. Labour might struggle to recover, and we face a difficult, an ominous challenge looking at the electorate down the line.”

He said that, in recent years, Brexit and the effect of Trump had helped Labour hold on to the kind of middle class and upper middle class voters who had traditionally voted Tory.

Emphasising the need for the party to seize the momentum on Europe, he added: “And I don't think we're going to hold on to them forever.”

In response to Mr Judah, Downing Street pointed to the prime minister’s words on Brexit on the way to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Monday night. As well as opening the door to rejoin appearing in the next Labour manifesto, he said his immediate priority was to continue to rebuild bridges with EU allies.

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