Euan McColm: Why Sir Keir Starmer must be as ruthless on Brexit as he was when taking control of the Labour Party

It seems inconceivable that Sir Keir Starmer won’t be our next Prime Minister.

The Labour leader continues to glide through this election campaign without a stumble. Polls show Starmer on course to win a record majority and nothing the Tories throw at him seems to stick.

For the first couple of weeks of this race to Downing Street, the Tories went with “Labour’s two grand tax rise” but a scare story about finances from the party of Liz Truss was always going to have limited appeal. The other weapon frequently deployed against Starmer has been his past support for his predecessor as Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Why, goes the Tory line, should anyone trust a man who, in 2019, campaigned to make Corbyn Prime Minister? It was an issue that arose again during an “leaders special” episode of BBC One’s Question Time, last week. Starmer was pressed by presenter Fiona Bruce on his claim, before the last election, that Corbyn would make “a great Prime Minister” and he did not look at all comfortable.

His answer was an awkwardly delivered mix of “Well, it was clear Jeremy wasn’t going to win” and “Labour has changed” with a splash of “he’d have been a better PM than Boris Johnson” on top.

This is a legitimate line of questioning. Under Corbyn, Labour became a safe haven for antisemites and pro-Putin cranks. By 2019, the prospect of him becoming Prime Minister had even lifelong Labour members turning to other parties.

However, it’s clear the Corbyn question is doing Starmer no harm. It’s not news to voters that he was a key member of Corbyn’s front bench and huge numbers of them are just fine with it.

It is something that, when raised in focus groups, frequently elicits the response that Starmer was just doing his job.

If Starmer would now give a straight answer to the question of why he backed Corbyn in 2019, I think it might be something like: “I didn’t support Jeremy’s leadership campaign but I respected the democratic outcome of the contest. However, like other colleagues, I had grave concerns about the direction of the party under his leadership and about his judgement on issues of antisemitism. I understood why some good colleagues felt they could no longer serve but I felt the need to stay and to fight to save the party from the damage Jeremy was inflicting. I stayed so I could play my part in rebuilding a Labour Party fit to serve the people who need us. As leader, I’ve taken the decisions necessary to ensure Jeremy Corbyn can no longer stand for our party. His values are not ours.”

Would voters really be so horrified by this? It’s what they think happened, after all. Could it be that people understand the necessary hypocrisies and brutal compromises of politics? Is it possible not everyone thinks Machiavelli painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

Starmer played the Labour left in order to get the leadership (and boy, are those guys complaining, now). He let Corbyn’s acolytes believe he shared their values and, once they gave him power, he coldly betrayed them.

Was this utterly devious behaviour? Yes.

Was it morally justifiable? Also, emphatically, yes.

Starmer is seen by many voters as cautious and even rather dull (a perception which, after years of chaos under a succession of dreadful Conservative Prime Ministers, is only enhancing his chances of leading Labour to victory) but the way in which he seized back the party he now leads from a cabal of cranks - and the speed with which he began the process of disinfecting it - point to a politician capable of both boldness and ruthlessness.

With Nigel Farage back in the game, standing for Reform in Clacton and - by look of polls - likely to become an MP at his eighth attempt, Brexit has become another key issue in this campaign.

Not only is Farage pushing hard the line with Eurosceptic voters in England that they have been let down by the Conservatives (the Reform leader’s cheerleaders can be heard on a TV near you, throughout each day, explaining that Brexit hasn’t been done properly, or “proply” as they all seem to pronounce it), but the SNP refuses to stop pointing out that that Scots did not vote to leave the EU.

Starmer is cautious on Brexit. The majority of voters in the “red wall” constituencies Labour lost to Boris Johnson’s Tories in 2019 supported the Leave campaign in 2016 and the Labour leader doesn’t want to say anything that might dissuade them from - as every polls suggests will happen - returning to the fold.

But in power? Might Prime Minister Starmer be able to display the sort of boldness on the matter of the UK’s relationship with the EU that he did while dragging his party from the clutches of a bunch of privately-educated Russian revolution re-enactment fantasists who’d have aligned the UK with Vladimir Putin?

After the election, the reactionary right will get dirtier on the delivery of Brexit, racist dogwhistles about immigration will grow more shrill, the effort to divide communities will become more concentrated.

Prime Minister Starmer won’t be able to accommodate that sort of thing. Rather, he will have to fight back and fight back, hard.

Starmer stands to have a huge majority, post July 4. He should use the authority this will give him to start speaking some blunt and ugly truths not only about Brexit but about the politicians who supported - and personally benefited from - leaving the EU.

Rarely has the British electorate been more receptive to the idea that the Conservative Party is institutionally dishonest. As Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer should start showing how this dishonesty led to Brexit, with all the economic damage it has caused, and make rebuilding needlessly damaged relationships with our European neighbours a priority.