For the most part, Steven Spielberg has avoided most of the indignities of the modern day press tour. He hasn’t had to subject himself to any spicy chicken wings, or summon any witticisms when presented with a cloche-covered sausage roll. Unlike many other celebrities, he hasn’t chosen to promote Disclosure Day by answering softball questions while simultaneously fashioning a Lionel Richie-style clay approximation of himself for YouTube. For this he should be applauded.

Instead, Spielberg has spent this promotional cycle on something more suited to his stature. A maestro tour, if you will, on which he gets to position Disclosure Day against a body of work that is second to none. Publications have run long oral histories about his entire career. He was a guest during the prestigious final week of Stephen Colbert’s talkshow. He was interviewed by the New York Times about the exact texture of ET’s skin.

That last one really did happen. A clip of the interview has gone mildly viral, featuring interviewer Rachel Abrams straight-out asking Spielberg “Was ET slimy or dry?” before suggesting that this is a decades-old conundrum that had long foxed everyone she knows. To his credit, Spielberg answered the question with tremendous gusto, if a little bewilderment. “ET was a little moist but never slimy,” he replied, after shaking his head. He then explained that, while “ET was only dry when he got sick”, it would be wrong to call him slimy. Xenomorphs are slimy, he pointed out. “ET never had tendrils of drool.”

Now, why Abrams asked this question is another matter. The good faith interpretation is that Spielberg has spent the last half-century in the public eye, and been interviewed so many times that he has developed a tendency to become something of an anecdote jukebox, reeling out the hits unprompted. This is something that afflicts only the truly famous but it can be debilitating. There are, after all, only so many times that a person can hear Ringo Starr’s “I thought it was you three” story.

Viewed from this perspective, there is real value in extracting genuinely new information from A-list celebrities. The fact that ET is now canonically moist maybe adds something to the cultural conversation that wasn’t there before? If so, the question deserves to be commended. However, if Abrams just asked a deliberately dumb question to the director of Schindler’s List because she knew it would get clicks, then that is another matter entirely.

We must also question why the subject arose in the first place. Abrams’s justification that it was in the public interest, since it had long been a discussion within her social group, rings a little false, because presumably everyone in her social group has eyes and can see perfectly well for themselves that ET isn’t slimy. It’s right there! All through the film! We know what texture ET’s skin is because ET is a visible character throughout the entire movie. As everybody knows, ET’s skin is clearly pleather or pleather-adjacent, like the skin of a Mediterranean grandmother. There is certainly no slime there. If there was, then the film would have included a scene of Drew Barrymore skidding about in ET’s slug trail, or the climatic hug scene between ET and Elliott would have ended with Elliott looking down at his slime-covered clothes and tutting, “These were new on today.”

But none of that happened so we can reasonably ascertain that ET isn’t slimy and this was a stupid question to ask. Still, the new media landscape loves nothing more than a replicable format, so perhaps this is something we’ll see more of in the future. For all we know, the New York Times is working on a series called Famous Auteurs Answer Self-Evident Questions as we speak, and this time next week they’ll drag Martin Scorsese in to ask if Jake LaMotta had 12 ears, or Paul Thomas Anderson to ask if Daniel Day-Lewis is secretly a mouse. For the avoidance of doubt, I hope this happens.

Brexit has depressed UK exports to the EU by 12%, and rejoining the customs union would undo only a fraction of the damage, research shared with the Guardian shows.

With the UK’s future relationship with the bloc likely to feature prominently in a potential Labour leadership contest, the economists John Springford and Anton Spisak, of the Centre for European Reform, provide fresh evidence of the damage caused by exiting.

A decade on from the referendum, they have found that services sector exports to the EU are 7% lower than they would have been if the UK had remained in the EU, and goods exports are 16% lower.

Using detailed trade data and economic modelling, they show that the “overwhelming majority” of the impact – 10% of the total 12% decline in exports – is accounted for by leaving the single market.

“The regulatory costs related to Brexit – such as new certification procedures and checks for compliance with EU standards – have had a much more significant impact on UK-EU trade than customs-related barriers,” they say.

The hardest-hit sectors have been travel, finance and insurance, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, and agrifood.

The estimate of lost services exports is larger than previous research has suggested, because the authors take into account a significant uptick in services trade within the EU since the Covid pandemic that the UK has missed out on.

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have increasingly stressed the importance of striking a closer trading relationship with the EU, with a summit to be held next month.

But the government has said it will stick to Labour’s manifesto promises not to rejoin the single market or customs union, or accept the free movement of people.

More recently, potential leadership candidates Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have both suggested they would like to see the UK rejoin the EU at some point in the future.

The Liberal Democrats had previously advocated rejoining the customs union as the first step to reversing Brexit, but their leader, Ed Davey, announced this week that the party would now campaign for the UK to re-enter the single market.

The CER research suggests the upside of rejoining the customs union alone would be modest. It would eliminate the need for UK firms to comply with complex “rules of origin”, about where the content of exports comes from, to qualify for tariff-free trade.

But a customs union would have no benefit for the hard-hit services sector, and by analysing which goods exports currently do not comply with the rules, Springford and Spisak suggest the impact on overall trade would be small.

Meanwhile the UK would lose the opportunity to pursue trade deals with non-EU countries, because members of the customs union have to apply EU tariffs.

However, Springford and Spisak point out that the more radical step of rejoining the single market would entail risky political trade-offs, including signing up to the free movement of people, paying into the EU budget and following European rules the UK has had no say in setting.

“The overwhelming majority of the estimated trade impacts stem from leaving the single market. Recovering those losses would entail re-integrating with the EU economy via a single market, either in goods or in full, through a bespoke arrangement or eventual EU membership,” they argue.

“Either path involves difficult political choices: accepting free movement, making budget contributions, and aligning with EU rules without a vote on them. The more privileged the single market access sought by the UK, the greater the obligations it would be expected to accept.”

Reeves has suggested “dynamic alignment” in some sectors, with the UK agreeing to follow EU rules in exchange for increased market access. But Brussels-watchers are sceptical how much further along this route the EU would be willing to go without insisting the UK accept free movement and budget contributions.

Advocates of Brexit argued before the 2016 referendum that increased trade with non-EU countries, as the UK disentangled itself from the constraints imposed by Brussels, would offset any hit to EU trade. But Springford and Spisak find little evidence that this has happened thus far.

They say their findings are consistent with several studies suggesting that Brexit has knocked between 4% and 8% off UK GDP.