Starmer is leading a slow march towards a softer Brexit — he just won’t say it out loud

Brexit isn’t working.

You know it, I know it, and so do a third of leavers, according to recent polling. Yet still the leaders of both Britain’s major parties can’t quite bring themselves to say it.

Rishi Sunak couldn’t retreat fast enough from reports that he might be pondering a Swiss-style relationship with the EU. Now Keir Starmer has followed suit, insisting Swiss-style freedom of movement is “a red line for me”, despite arguing the opposite when running for Labour leader. The reality is that whoever is in government after 2024 will almost certainly seek to unravel aspects of Boris Johnson’s deal, which is due for review in 2025, but neither really wants to say so. So instead they’re playing a nervous game of grandmother’s footsteps with the public, creeping a step or two closer to reality-based politics when they think they can get away with it, but freezing the minute they’re spotted. It’s farcical in both cases, but somehow more depressing when it comes from the Labour leader, once the great hero of the pro-remain resistance.

Related: Keir Starmer rules out return of free movement between Britain and EU

Even some loyal Starmer supporters, resolved to do whatever it takes to win this time, struggle with watching him hold the Brexit line just as public opinion seems to be shifting against it, with a new Redfield and Wilton poll showing 57% would now vote to rejoin the EU. It’s dispiriting, too, to watch business make the case for more immigration while a Labour party that prides itself on being serious and honest about the big challenges hides behind its skirt.

Those close to him make no secret of the fact that his overriding priority is not to jeopardise the victory within reach. He sees “red wall” voters who have swung back from the Tories to Labour as volatile, capable of swinging again. (Nigel Farage certainly thinks so, or he wouldn’t be trying frantically to get back in on the action.) Even without Brexit, by now we would have been entering that dismally familiar stage of the electoral cycle where Ed Milband’s Labour party started selling “controls on immigration” mugs, knowing full well that part of its base wanted to hear it even if another part was outraged and alienated. But if it’s a depressingly familiar story on immigration, on Brexit something slightly subtler is going on.

Thrilling as that poll majority for rejoining the EU looks, it’s almost certainly a majority for something that isn’t on offer, which is going back to 2015. (Watch it vanish if voters are told that the price of rejoining might be adopting the euro.) And even leavers who have turned against Brexit don’t want to be made to feel stupid for having supported it. But if they aren’t yet ready to let go of the idea completely, there is at least solid support now for a form of Brexit that doesn’t leave us so broke. Two-thirds of voters overall favour closer future ties with the EU, according to polling from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, which this week published a blueprint for sidling in that direction.

First, the paper argues, the government should build goodwill with our neighbours – something Sunak is in fairness now attempting – and seek a workable solution to the flaws in the Northern Ireland protocol. Then it should adopt high standards on food, labour and the environment to show that Britain isn’t trying to undercut its neighbours. Only then should it try negotiating a better deal, although still one that stops short of joining the single market. The overall idea is to insist that Brexit is now a reality but start moving the public towards a softer version of it, without ever quite calling it that. If there is a sense, hanging unspoken in the air, that eventually Britain could move back towards EU membership, then it’s nowhere to be found in this report.

Related: Keir Starmer promises to end ‘short-term fix’ of foreign workers

But it’s a plan, at least, and it’s what Starmer has effectively been doing for a while, by simultaneously ruling out freedom of movement while also talking – as he did again at the weekend – about a stronger trading relationship with the EU and reducing red tape for business. The problem is that the remain-friendly bit comes across as technical, dull and vague by comparison with the leave-friendly bit. Starmer is shouting through a megaphone at leave voters but dropping discreet, eminently missable hints for remainers. What it’s lacking is something to make the miserable slog ahead come alive for them.

For it’s a long, long haul from here to anything like the relationship with Europe we once had, assuming that it will be 2028 at least before any major party dares to stand on a remain-friendly platform of pointing out the bleeding obvious. By then we will have had 12 wasted years of missed opportunities, and the EU may have moved on far enough without us that rejoining no longer seems realistic.

But those of us who have endured three failed versions of Brexit already – under Theresa May, Johnson and Liz Truss respectively – are still being asked to sit patiently through at least a couple more, just to prove definitively that the thing we always said would be a disaster is in fact a disaster. If he’s lucky, Starmer will find most Labour remainers are now desperate enough to get rid of this current government that they’ll grit their teeth and fall in behind him, hoping he’ll be bolder in power than in opposition. But he shouldn’t take that goodwill for granted.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist