Jeremy Corbyn’s latest Brexit strategy: I don’t care about Brexit and neither should you

The Labour leader is gearing up for an election in which he will try to convince the country to stop caring about the one thing that’s tearing the UK apart

No article on Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit can begin in earnest without referring back to April 2016, when he launched his party’s referendum campaign by telling his audience they were inside a building that had once been used as the Ministry of Truth for a film version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. He let out a half chuckle, cocked his head to one side, and with some jovial self-disdain said the words, “We shall see.”

It was an almost – almost – admirable way of acknowledging that he, an on the record Eurosceptic of three decades standing, now had no choice but to reluctantly lead his party’s Remain campaign; he knew and you knew that nothing he was about to say would be true, but it would all be over soon and then we could all just forget about it.

Three, shall we say unfortunate, years later, there is no point trying to understand anything Corbyn says about Brexit, without viewing it through the prism that all of it has always been a deception, not merely from day one, but from sentence one on day one.

And here he was, in a community centre in Corby, saying again that, “We will do everything necessary to stop a no-deal Brexit.”

Which is all very well, but when you happen to have personally watched him walk through the voting lobbies in the House of Commons, three times, to vote down the deal that would have stopped no deal, there is a kind of deja vu on these occasions.

“If you’re serious about stopping a no-deal Brexit,” he said, “then back my motion of no confidence, to stop this government taking us over a cliff edge on the 31 October.”

And if you’re serious about stopping no-deal Brexit, try not to dwell too long on whether or not you’ve already tried to stop no-deal Brexit by backing a Corbyn motion of no confidence in the government, a few months ago, and whether or not, generally speaking, that’s done you much good on the whole stopping no-deal Brexit front.

When, three years ago, in the middle of his most high-profile TV appearance of the referendum campaign, Corbyn told Channel 4’s The Last Leg that he cared, “oooh about seven out of ten” about actually winning the campaign he was leading, it seemed, at the time, to be a moment of madness.

But, there’s an election coming up, and “oooh seven out of ten” is now official party strategy. “Brexit is the framework of the crisis we face,” he said, “but the problems we face are much, much deeper.”

The NHS. Austerity. Tax cuts for the rich. And so on. And so on. Just like a few months ago, when the Corbyn schtick was all about telling Mike from Mansfield and Bob from Brixton that even though one voted leave and the other remain, they were both one and the same, Corbyn still thinks his best hope is to try and convince the country that, just like him, it doesn’t actually care about Brexit.

There are various U-shaped graphs on professor John Curtice’s laptop that point to the likelihood of success with this particular strategy.

In any event, by mid-afternoon on Monday 19 August, Labour’s current Brexit position is thus.

A vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson, followed by a general election in which Labour would offer a second referendum with the option to remain. It would also, somehow, then negotiate a better Brexit deal than the current one, and the EU’s persistent refusal to renegotiate the deal would magically not apply to Corbyn’s new government in the way that it does to Johnson’s.

And once it had secured this superior deal, it would then campaign against its own deal in a second referendum, in favour of remaining instead.

Whether you choose to believe this last bit or not is frankly up to you. But, at least for the time being, it would appear to be the truth.