Lucky general Starmer has dodged the Brexit election bullet by simply doing nothing

Everybody knows that the Labour leader and most of his MPs would rejoin the EU if they could – but, luckily for him, nobody seems to care anymore, writes John Rentoul

By saying as little as possible until people lost interest, has Keir Starmer been tactically ruthless – or extremely lucky? (PA)

Keir Starmer is a lucky general, again. I thought that, however difficult life outside the EU would turn out to be, Brexit was going to be a big problem for Labour at the election.

It would be impossible for the party to fight the election on an honest prospectus, because it would have to say that rejoining the EU was not an option when everyone knows that this is precisely what Starmer and most of his MPs would ideally like to do.

When Britain finally left the EU single market, at the end of 2020, I wrote that Brexit would be Starmer’s “biggest weakness” at the next election – because he will be “fighting an election saying one thing when everyone knows he really believes something different”.

Rosie Duffield, the Labour MP for Canterbury, had just said “the majority” of Labour MPs “are still desperate to rejoin if we possibly can, I think, at heart”. She accepted that nothing would happen for five years, but was spikily dismissive of the idea that Starmer’s line would hold: “Possibly we might even have a different sort of set-up, a different leader by then, who knows.”

And yet, here we are with perhaps 14 months to run until the election and Starmer’s problem has solved itself. Leaving the EU is now seen as having gone so badly that Conservative claims that Labour secretly wants to rejoin have lost their sting. Not only does a clear majority of British voters think that Brexit was the wrong decision, but rejoining – which is a demanding proposition – is supported by a margin of roughly 60-40.

I’m not sure how many people have actually changed their minds since the referendum. Some have, but many more take refuge in “don’t know”, or the view that the government has handled Brexit so badly that it may not have been worth it. But this isn’t only about numbers: it is about strength of feeling. Leavers, who felt fiercely protective of their vote when it seemed that parliament and the universe were conspiring to frustrate it, feel less strongly now that Brexit has been delivered.

Looking back, I made two mistakes. One was to misinterpret the power of “Get Brexit Done” as a slogan. Half of it was to insist that the referendum vote be respected, which implied a heavy price to be paid for backsliding after Brexit happened; but the other half was just to get rid of the issue so that we never had to hear about it again. That second sentiment just wanted it done and gone and is not much interested in what becomes of our relationship with the EU.

My second mistake was to think that pragmatic compromise would soften the effects of Boris Johnson’s “hard” Brexit so that the extra costs of border controls wouldn’t be quite so obvious. Well, there has been pragmatic compromise – the government has again delayed the introduction of full border controls from this October – and yet the costs have still been heavy.

No wonder some of the Leave voters I know tell themselves that this wasn’t the Brexit they voted for; that they were quite happy to be in the closest possible economic federation with the rest of Europe, as long as they were outside the political union and the free movement of people. This is, of course, roughly what Theresa May negotiated, but she was sabotaged by an unholy alliance of hard-Brexit Tories and the Labour Party.

Starmer ought to bear some responsibility for the state we now find ourselves in. As shadow Brexit secretary, he led Labour’s response when May, late in the day, tried to win cross-party support. But he escaped the wreckage with barely a scratch.

And now he has escaped again. He ought to find it awkward to fight an election campaign on a manifesto of keeping Britain out of the EU when everyone knows he thinks we would be better off in. But now it is even more awkward for the Tories to accuse him of wanting to reverse the great gains the country has made as a result of Brexit.

After all the heat and fury of 2016-19, the biggest eruption of the Europe issue in British politics since the war, things have reverted to their historical norm remarkably quickly. I have been looking at the opinion polls at the time Harold Macmillan made the UK’s first application to join the common market in 1961: most people didn’t have strong views – 40 per cent said they didn’t know what they thought; most of the rest were in favour of it if the government thought it was a good idea.

Most of the time, most people in Britain don’t care much about Europe at all. By saying as little as possible until people lost interest, has Keir Starmer been tactically ruthless – or extremely lucky?