Brexiteers Won't Forget Starmer's Gross Insult

'The polls currently show Labour 20 points ahead and on course for a landslide. Don’t believe them.'

Imagine taking part in an electoral contest the result of which all major participants agreed in advance must be honoured and implemented.

Imagine then being on the losing team and a year or so down the line, with the verdict of the people yet to be enacted, making a categorical statement that it absolutely must be, as a point of principle.

Now imagine pulling the plug on all that a few months later and calling for a new contest that could overturn the prior result before it had been put into effect.

All that is a basic summary of Keir Starmer’s input into the Brexit years: He fought on the Remain team; he lost; days before the 2017 election as Labour Brexit Spokesman he promised the party would implement the result; by 2018 he was getting a standing ovation at the Labour Conference when calling for another referendum with Remain on the ballot.

Stuart Mitchell/@IncMonocle

Terrible behaviour, clearly. In fact, a gross insult to 17.4 million Leave voters whose ballots he tried to cancel.

But now you need to imagine one more thing – the most preposterous thing of all: Imagine avoiding being grilled about this political chicanery for years on end by a pro-Remain media class and then finally getting asked about it at a press conference and having no satisfactory explanation of your conduct.

That was what happened to Starmer yesterday when a journalist from The Sun came to the conclusion that his adoption of the “Take Back Control” slogan of the official Leave campaign and explicit courting of Leave voters was an act of chutzpah so outrageous that it merited him actually being questioned about his Brexit record.

Why did you advocate a second referendum, do you regret doing so and why should anyone who voted Leave believe what you say now? That was the thrust of the question posed to Starmer by Sun political correspondent Jack Elsom (and well done that man by the way for being the lobby hack to finally ask these basic questions).

What came next was stunning.