Sir Keir Starmer has an ever more faraway look these days. Not the thousand-yard stare of a man who has seen a little too much in his life, but rather the besotted, moony gaze of someone pining for a lost love.

It is all to our detriment that love resides across the Channel in the gilded halls of Brussels. Over the weekend, hidden under the horrid torrent of misery fountaining out of Iran, reports emerged that our Prime Minister – the man who once campaigned for a second referendum to overturn the first one – signed us all up to something called the “dynamic alignment”. I imagined at first this was some sort of spine-tingling procedure you ask a chiropractor for, but instead it turns out it’s intended to “free British food and farming businesses from the mountains of paperwork”.

Now that sounds to me to be a claim only marginally less credible than a used-car salesman announcing he wants to save you money.

What dynamic alignment actually means (Brussels types do love their jargon) is that Britain will automatically update its laws to match whatever the European Union decides. With no vote in Parliament, and no say from Whitehall.

Of course, the European Court of Justice will oversee things. British farmers and food producers answering to foreign judges. Just like old times, I suppose?

A total of 17.4million people voted to leave. While Sir Keir was not among them, it perhaps should not be all that much of a stretch to ask if he might respect that outcome?

The arithmetic makes matters worse, with just 8% of British businesses exporting to the EU. Meanwhile, 14% flog their wares to the rest of the world.

So we are surrendering sovereignty – that word again – to accommodate the smaller constituency while potentially kneecapping the larger one.

But then this was always Sir Keir’s difficulty. Our Prime Minister never wanted Brexit in the first place, presumably thinking that faster passport queues in French airports was a decent trade-off for allowing Brussels to write our laws.

Sir Keir campaigned to Remain with the fervour of a convert and then pushed for a people’s vote (dreadful phrase) when the people had already voted. Now here he is in Downing Street, scuttling back to the embrace of the EU like a prodigal son who never really left home.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, we cannot even dispatch a ship to protect our own RAF bases in Cyprus without waiting a good few weeks. Energy bills are flying through the roof, and taxes are out of control, while a greedy Treasury looks to the nation’s farms to rake in a bit of extra cash.

Does Sir Keir attend to any of these matters? Does he roll up his sleeves and fix what he has broken? He does not. He is too busy making doe eyes at Brussels whilst signing away chunks of self-government.

Brexit meant writing our own rules and governing ourselves. Not handing regulatory control to the ECJ the moment the paperwork gets tiresome. The British public understood this in 2016. One wonders if Sir Keir ever will.