SIR KEIR STARMER had an easy time in Prime Minister’s Questions. Nigel Farage wisely stayed away and dead-in-the-water Tory former minister Robert Jenkin unwarily picked the wrong moment to upbraid the premier for “reversing Brexit.”

Flaunting his not-very-comprehensive trade agreements with India and the United States, he pointed out in a lawyerly manner that these two rather unimpressive deals had the virtue — temporary but real — of being “inconsistent” with EU membership.

Starmer knows full well that the Remainer fantasy of a return to membership of the EU is politically impossible and to advocate it would shred much of what remains of Labour’s working-class vote.

Hence the renewed narrative — that it is all about trade deals and a similar deal with the EU can be done.

For our ruling class the really important bits of Britain’s relationship with the EU were always the freedom of movement for capital and services and — don’t say it out loud — but an easily accessible pool of labour, both skilled and less skilled, importable on licence and at the behest of the employers whose interests British governments of any complexion attend to carefully.

Their new interest is in leveraging a new arrangement with the EU institutions to ramp up spending on war preparations.

Starmer’s parliamentary problems are not located in the benches before him but behind in the chamber and on the streets outside.

There is a minor dispute, as there always is, about how many people were on the Palestine Solidarity/Stop the War march at the weekend last.

The important number is the proportion of the British people who want a change of government policy on Palestine. Before Tuesday’s words-only U-turn just over one in 12 British people thought the government had the right approach to events in Israel and Palestine.

The overwhelming majority thought the government had it wrong and its present manoeuvring, verbal pyrotechnics and no change on the practical policy front is not sustainable.

What is striking about the parliamentary posturing is, first, the way in which Starmer bigfooted Lammy by pre-empting his statement with one of his own and, second, the rank hypocrisy on display from the the pair of them.

The Foreign Secretary said the threat of starvation faced by civilians in Gaza is abominable: “Civilians in Gaza facing starvation, homelessness, trauma, desperate for this war to end, now confront renewed bombardment, new displacement and new suffering.”

The question asks itself. If these things are abominable now, were they not also abominable before and why is now the moment to reveal just how unprincipled our foreign policy is.

It is rare for a foreign policy question to be so in the forefront of British politics but Palestinian solidarity is the popular mindset.

Not so Starmer, whose popularity rating has suffered another drop over last month. The proportion of people in Britain with an unfavourable view of Starmer has risen from 62 per cent last month to 69 per cent today. This makes his net favourability rating down to -46 which, according to YouGov, is the lowest it has ever recorded.

After a fortnight in which Starmer upstaged Enoch Powell in coded racist rhetoric and performed a somersault over the Israeli offensive, his popularity has suffered another five-point drop.

And critically, his fall in popularity is concentrated among Labour voters, a 1.7 per cent increase on last month.

Labour’s brand, in practice its standing among people who it needs to mobilise, is tanking.

The bearers of the brand, the hundreds of MPs elected on a minority of votes and with wafer-thin majorities need to think through what needs to be done.