Starmer's EU deal sends right-wing rags back to 2016

Keir Starmer’s UK-EU reset deal has allowed Britain’s right wing media to hark back to happier times – nine years ago, in fact, when their circulations were healthier, they had far more influence than in today’s digital/social age and the Brexit they all supported had yet to be exposed as a total disaster.

“End of the Brexit dream” wept the Daily Mail’s front page on Tuesday morning – though judging by the opinion polls, even Mail readers think the Brexit dream might have died when it started to steal £100 billion a year from the UK economy while comprehensively failing to cut net migration.

The Sun, predictably, went with “Done up like a Kipper”, with a front page image of the fish and mention of various Brexit betrayals – though oddly no mention that every fisherman will tell you Brexit has been a nightmare. This was accompanied by a lead article by the US-bound Harry Cole, which claimed that Starmer had “caved in hook, line and stinker” to the dreaded French and Spanish.

Cole, who is moving to Washington DC soon, then showed Trumpian hype on Sky News when discussing the reset deal’s youth mobility scheme on Sky News. Like the youth mobility schemes Britain has with other countries, there will be a strict quota on those coming in and out, with figures of around 200,000 a year being mooted (Australia currently gets 42,000 youth visas per year).

Yet Cole – himself a youngish person migrating to work abroad – feared that was underplaying it slightly, “The potential is that up to 80 million will qualify for this now,” he said. We’ll miss him when he’s gone.

(Cole’s prediction wasn’t quite the worst bit of TV punditry on reset day; that went to new Reform MP Sarah Pochin, who told GB News: “All this talk about letting lorries through the border without being checked, well that’s just dragging us back towards EU regulation and checks that we don’t want and red tape that we don’t want”.)

The Express’s front page (“Keir’s abject surrender of Brexit Britain”) reported apocalyptic comments by Nigel Farage. It was a huge leap from their front page of a day earlier (“Betray Britain at your peril”), which reported apocalyptic comments by Nigel Farage. Both he and the Express have learned nothing.

Finally, “Kiss goodbye to Brexit” was the Telegraph’s verdict, accompanied by hand-wringing comment pieces by David Frost and Liam Fox, both of whom tried and comprehensively failed to extract anything of value from the project they championed. Columnist Tim Stanley wrote: “All Europe had to do was wait for a proper chump to enter No 10”. Tim Stanley supported Liz Truss’s bid to become prime minister in 2022, and thus knows a proper chump in No 10 when he sees one.