The answer arrived on a podcast, ten years late, delivered in the tone of a man returning a library book he is fairly sure was never his fault. Prime Minister Andy Burnham told listeners it is “clear” that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and then, because Britain does things properly, warned France and Germany that the same thing is happening to them right now.

The sentence itself is short. The distance it traveled is the story. For a decade the official British position was that there was no evidence of successful Russian interference in the vote. That position was held by successive governments with the patience of a man standing on a foot he cannot move. On Sunday a prime minister moved the foot.

What makes the moment so admirable is the paperwork. Burnham said he asked the question on arriving at Downing Street — was there interference in 2016? — and received a clear answer: yes, there was. Somewhere in Whitehall, a civil servant has now performed the single most British act in the modern state: taking a question that has been sitting in a drawer since 2016, reading it once, and writing “yes” in a room where someone will eventually have to say it out loud.

That official — let us call him the Deputy Director for Referendum Matters, because the title is surely real and the pay is surely not — has spent ten years holding two facts in his hands at once. Fact one: the vote happened. Fact two: somebody helped. The genius of the British state is that it kept both facts alive for a decade without ever introducing them to each other, the way a family keeps two cousins who had a fight in 1994 at the same wedding by seating them in different hemispheres.

The warning to France and Germany is the part that lands as genuine statesmanship. Britain is not hiding its embarrassment. Britain is forwarding it. The message to Paris and Berlin reads, in the plainest diplomatic English available: we did not know, then we knew, and we are telling you now because we are you, only further along.

No evidence of how the interference worked was provided. This is not a gap. It is a courtesy. A full accounting would require naming the mechanism, and naming the mechanism would require admitting that a referendum is a machine with a door in it. Britain has decided, at last, to leave the door open and simply stand in front of it, looking concerned, on a podcast.

The hearing on the matter, such as it was, has not been scheduled.