BORIS JOHNSON: Sir Keir Schnorrer plans to lock us again into Brussels

Come on then, Starmer. Spill the beans. Spit it out, man – because we all deserve to know exactly how you are going to change Britain’s relations with the European Union.

On this crucial issue there would appear to be a gigantic Labour conspiracy of silence, and it can’t go on. With less than four weeks to go, Starmer is determined to bore his way to victory, slinking into Downing Street as silently and inscrutably as Larry the cat.

You could see it in the TV debate, where he offered his fabled imitation of a blinking human bollard. Sir Keir Schnorrer hopes to benefit from popular frustration with government and acquire the biggest and least-deserved parliamentary majority in recent history.

If he does, he will do all sorts of appalling things. He will whack up your taxes and wallow in wokery; and I tell you this, my friends. If Schnorrer gets in, he will immediately begin the process of robbing this country of its new-found independence, and make the UK the punk of the EU.

Bit by bit he will give up our freedoms until this country is effectively locked in the legislative dungeon of Brussels like some orange ball-chewing gimp.

Keir Starmer meets Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Union Commission, during the Munich Security Conference earlier this year

What you need to know – and what he isn’t telling you – is that if Starmer gets in, he will abandon Brexit. He won’t formally rejoin – he hasn’t the guts to try that, yet.

He will go for the worst of all worlds, where we remain out of the EU, but become a vassal state: the very fate we in the Tory government that I led spent years trying to avoid, because it was emphatically not what people voted for, and it is not right for this country.

It is now almost exactly eight years since the people of Britain voted to take back control of their democracy. Given the voices raised against that proposal – every major political party, much of the media, virtually the entire UK establishment – it was a decision of huge courage.

The people voted Leave because they believed in this country and its potential. They did it because they thought that by taking back control of our laws, our borders and some pretty sizeable sums of money, they might have a new and exciting future.

They were right. You won’t hear it much these days, but already Brexit has been proving its worth. It was thanks to Brexit, never let it be forgotten, that we were able to approve of Covid vaccines significantly faster than the EU, with the result that we had the fastest vaccine rollout and the fastest exit from lockdown of any major European country.

In helping to save many thousands of lives of elderly or vulnerable people – by giving them vaccines earlier – Brexit has already been amply vindicated. But there has been so much more.

Thanks to Brexit, the UK has had a genuinely independent foreign policy, where we have been able to do things that would have been impossible within the EU framework. Take Ukraine, where Brexit Britain – paradoxically – has led Europe in stiffening our continent’s resistance to Putin.

Ten years ago, Britain was excluded from the so-called ‘Normandy Format’, in which France and Germany were made responsible – on behalf of the whole EU – for policy on Ukraine. The result was a farce, in which the EU treated Putin’s 2014 invasion as if it were a marital tiff between Russia and Ukraine.

Has Brexit given us more freedom on the world stage? You bet it has, and the same point could be made about the AUKUS defence pact with Australia and the US. We would never have dared, within the EU, to have caused such a diplomatic rumpus.

Thanks to Brexit, we have been able to do free-trade deals: not just rollovers of existing EU agreements, but genuinely new expansions of free trade like the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) which is shortly to come into force.

Thanks to Brexit we have cut tariffs already on everything from plastic seals for engines to shoe leather to tropical fruit juice. We have cut VAT on sanitary products, and have the freedom to do much more. We have already taken back control of much of our fisheries, and by 2026 our control will be complete.

We are able to do things in the interests of UK businesses – whether that is getting rid of the EU’s three-crop system of agriculture or their rules on lorry trailers. Thanks to Brexit, we are already regulating more flexibly on the cutting-edge technologies, gene editing, data and AI.

It took years to achieve these freedoms, and the result is that we have only recently begun the process of divergence. The full economic benefits will take time – but UK has been growing faster than Germany since the pandemic, and the latest data shows that we are the fourth-biggest exporter of services in the world.

Yes, we have productivity problems in this country, but they are nothing to do with Brexit. If anything, we need more deregulation, not less.

Remember all those threats about mass unemployment if the people dared to vote Leave? They all turned out to be lies.

Larry the Downing Street  cat – almost as silent and inscrutable as Sir Keir Starmer

You will hear none of these points from Labour, because Keir Starmer’s party are passionately in favour of rejoining the EU. Look at the front bench – every one a Remainer. Look at Starmer himself – a former Shadow Brexit Secretary who voted dozens of times against bills that would have allowed the UK to leave the EU.

If he is elected, I guarantee he will end his tactical silence on the question, and claim that all Britain’s problems are down to Brexit, and he will have a chorus of support from the media, and all those distinguished people who supported Remain and who have never got over it.

He will begin by aligning with EU laws on such things as food standards; then he will rejoin the customs union, and paying into the EU budget, and then he will declare that Britain will accept the full package of EU single-market law.

Finally he will break his pledge, to secure that single-market access, and go back to free movement of EU nationals into Britain. He won’t need a referendum. He will simply be able to use his parliamentary majority to force it all through.

At every stage he will be subjecting Britain to EU control, while gaining no say for Britain in the EU.

So he needs to be challenged, now. Will he rule out ever paying into the EU budget? Will he rule out alignment with EU law? Will he rule out rejoining the customs union and the single market?

I don’t believe he can honestly rule out any of those things – because that is what he intends to do. When people voted to leave the EU, they voted against an ideology that meant that the UK was part of a United States of Europe. They voted against the idea that any one of the 500 million EU nationals could come to the UK as easily as someone could move from Surrey to Hampshire.

They voted against the idea that Parliament could be subordinate to a foreign jurisdiction. They don’t want to go back to that. Labour does – and so does Starmer. They just won’t admit it this side of the election.

It’s time to smoke him out.