Where have all the Labour Remainers gone?

Emily Thornberry was allowed out by Labour handlers to do an interview with the Daily Mirror on Tuesday. The shadow foreign secretary said she was “not hiding”, but that her media appearances were a decision for the party.

All the same, her absence from the front rank of the election campaign has been noticed. Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, has had an even lower profile. As the two strongest advocates of remaining in the EU, the two have been eclipsed by John McDonnell, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Richard Burgon as the supporting acts to headliner Jeremy “Neutral” Corbyn.

In the seven-way TV debates, Long-Bailey and Burgon both hedged their position on Brexit, saying they would wait to see what kind of deal a Labour government negotiated before deciding whether to campaign for or against it in the referendum promised within six months of an election victory.

The Labour strategy is transparent – indeed, it was reported as a change in approach last week, with the campaign switching focus to Leave-voting seats in the midlands and north of England.

The party is worried about the loss of Leave voters in those seats. Survey after survey has suggested that Labour is suffering a dramatic switch of its vote, often directly to the Conservatives. At the start of the campaign, a constituency poll in Labour-held Workington in Cumbria suggested the Conservatives were ahead.

The two big polls – Best for Britain and YouGov, both using MRP seat-by-seat projections similar to the one that predicted a hung parliament last time – showed that Labour is poised to lose 50 or 60 seats, most of them in the north and midlands.

This week, Gary Gibbon of Channel 4 News broadcast two focus groups of people who voted Leave in 2016 and Labour in 2017 in Birmingham Northfield: not one person intended to vote Labour this time.

The party believes that it has got its message across to Remain voters – that the promise of a new referendum is the best hope of keeping Britain in the EU – and that this is successfully squeezing Liberal Democrat voters in Labour-Tory marginals in Remain areas.

But the trouble is that there are few winnable seats for Labour in these places, and the Lib Dems are well dug in in their target seats – with a chance of pulling off upsets in the London seats where Labour defectors Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna are standing.

So the Labour leadership is fighting a defensive battle, sending its well known Remainer shadow ministers to the Jacob Rees-Mogg rest home for embarrassing relatives during the election campaign, and trying desperately to change the subject from Brexit.