After what I witnessed, I'm convinced Keir Starmer is about to sell us out to the EU - Mark Francois

Specifically, Starmer has acceded to a process known as “dynamic alignment”, whereby in certain areas, including food standards and agricultural regulation, we would slavishly follow the rules of the EU – regardless of the will of Parliament.

The best way to explain dynamic alignment is to say that the clue is in the name – as the EU’s rules in those areas we have signed up for change, our rules automatically align with them.

This is totally against the spirit of what the British people voted for a decade ago. By agreeing to accept further areas in which dynamic alignment would apply, Starmer could surrender our sovereignty back to the EU, piece by piece.

But it gets worse. Starmer, whose poll ratings are in freefall, is apparently also contemplating closer alignment with the EU single market as part of his so-called “EU reset” and is also under pressure from senior members of his own party to rejoin the EU Customs Union. Again, totally at odds with the spirit of the Referendum. So, what, in practice, would those two measures actually mean?

To take the single market first. If we were somehow to rejoin it, a fundamental facet of the EU single market is the free movement of labour.

In other words, despite the mounting concern across the country on matters related to immigration, EU citizens and their dependents would be able once again to come and live in the United Kingdom, regardless of border controls.

With regards to the Customs Union, as it is known, the effect of rejoining this would mean that we would lose control over any independent trade policy.

If we were within the EU’s Customs Union, we could only sign international trade deals via the EU, rather than bilaterally ourselves. So, for instance, the trade deals that we have signed with India and Australia and indeed with the United States (although we would all like to see a more comprehensive version of that trade deal), might no longer be valid. They would have to be renegotiated, from scratch, under the auspices of the EU.

In addition, the major trade deal that we have signed up to in the form of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (the TPP) might also be invalidated, and, again, we would have to renegotiate this via the auspices of the EU’s Customs Union.

In short, if we were to rejoin either the single market or the Customs Union – or worst of all, both – because the Prime Minister saw this as some desperate last-gasp attempt to maintain his faltering Premiership, we would effectively have rejoined the European Union once again – without any democratic consent for such a decision.

I write this as someone who, between 2016 and 2019, witnessed first-hand what I call the “Battle for Brexit” in Parliament and saw Starmer, conniving night after night, week after week, with Europhile MPs – across all parties – in a desperate attempt to keep us within the European Union, at almost any cost.

Mr “Second Referendum”, as he became known at the time, also constantly called for another Referendum – because he simply couldn’t abide the result of the first one.

In other words, having observed this man closely in Parliament for years, “Starmer Remains a Remainer” at heart – and he always will.

Desperate men do desperate things, and so we all need to guard against some “last throw of the dice” by Starmer to rejoin the institutions of the EU, should the May elections be as bad for Labour as the pollsters would currently have us believe.

We in the Conservative Party would fight tooth and nail any attempt by Starmer and Labour to take us back into the EU, should that come to pass.