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”.