'Please Keir Starmer, get Brexit done with'

Daily Mirror

19-05-2025

Well, aren't these sunlit uplands an absolute f***ing delight.
Overnight talks going "down to the wire", unreasonable demands from the Frenchies, talk of "betrayal" and a migrant deal, Nigel Farage trundling around muttering about fishing rights, the country's stony broke and we've got nowhere near any of the stuff we were promised.
Nine years after the Brexit referendum in which every single person voted to END all of the above, the "easiest trade deal in history" is now also the longest and most annoying trade deal of our lifetimes, and probably responsible for 99% of voters wishing they'd never got out of bed.
Behold, ye, the sunlit uplands of post-Brexit Britain, with 4% knocked permanently off GDP, which analysis has shown is equivalent to £145m a week. That's half a bus, for those who can bear to remember the giant red lie which travelled the country with Boris Johnson bestride it, thumbs up and trousers down, mooning every granny caught in his wilful political gridlock.
We've got the gloomy blue passports, and the even-gloomier passport queues. We signed over fishing rights in 2020 because otherwise we'd never be able to chase the cod for Friday night dinner all the way to Norway. And we've waved a fond farewell and rather-less fond hello to migrants needed to make everything work properly, but now have to come from further afield and are therefore more likely to stay, more likely to have families, and are more noticeably FORRIN.
It is of note, yet is so little noted, that every single person who touched Brexit has been done away with somehow. Dave, Theresa, Boris, are as dust on the wind. David Davis who famously turned up to Brexit negotiations without pen or paper blustered his way back to the backbenches, Lord David 'Don't Worry I've Got This' Frost is reduced to penning painfully-mad newspaper columns, and even poor Steve Bray the Stop Brexit Madman of Westminster had his amps confiscated, and was dragged to court for the heinous crime of playing the Muppets theme tune at Rishi Sunak's Prime Ministerial limo.
He was found not guilty, and rightly so, for if Magna Carta meant anything it was to allow us to point out that Miss Piggy would have handled this with much more élan. No need to leave the Muppet bloc, no need to break Kermy's heart, poor old Fozzy Bear gets to keep his kazoo and the Snuffleupagus could carry on being something only Nigel could see.
Ah, Nigel. The one who survived Brexit. Like an irradiated cockroach, he just got bigger and stronger. His third and current political party is stronger than the Greens or Plaid Cymru, but still dwarfed by the number of MPs Keir Starmer has ejected from Labour.
In the EU, he barely did a lick of work while claiming plenty of expenses and airtime. Out of it, his days are pretty much the same, but he has at least saved himself the commute. He still knows nothing about fishing while wanging on about it whenever a camera is pointed in his face, still plays the Little Englander demanding his constitutional right to a lock-in at the golf club bar, still persuades people in that gravelly voice that he has a plan even when all the evidence shows his plans have historically been a f***ing s***show.
Leave the EU! he said. We're poor and getting strangled with more bureaucracy than the Germans ever demanded. There'll be fewer migrants! he said. There's more, and it's called 'The Boris Wave' or will be until it is badged 'The Brexit Tsunami' by some racist academic the BBC insists on broadcasting the views of. Buy nappies! he said. And then the bottom fell out of that market too.
If it weren't the most insensitive of jokes, I'd say Nigel's career has been one long plane crash and his sole admirable quality is the ability to somehow come out on top. If you flushed him, he'd float. Whatever he's made of, they should extract it to use in smartphones.
Now Keir Starmer has "reset" the relationship with the EU for about the umpteenth time in a decade, and for some it'll never be good enough, and others it will always be surrender. Nothing has changed since 2016. Europe is no further away from our businesses, and no less important. Its defence and security, as Putin has admirably proved in Ukraine, is still our defence and security. We had lower migration, lower long-term demographic change, and - gasp - fewer imported terrorists when we were in the EU, with access to its fingerprinting and intelligence systems, and my word but we need them back.
With the passage of time, events have proven that with Europe we are stronger, safer, and richer. We have more friends and more oomph. With a new trade deal, Starmer may have made his first bold move that most voters won't hate - that will bring economic growth, boost defence, and put money in pockets.
But the real win, the true shining diamond we all dream of, is that one day someone will strike a deal which enables us to drop the subject entirely. No more talk of surrender or collaboration, not a single column more on fishing rights, nary a word about enemies of the people or a border that isn't a border but now has to be. What we really need is a Prime Minister who can say that Brexit is done with. Please, Keir Starmer, let it be you.