If Brexit had a theme tune, it wouldn’t be the patriotic strains of Rule Britannia, or the stirring sounds of Jerusalem, but a far less triumphalist anthem: the laid-back West Coast sound of the Eagles, and their 1976 hit Hotel California.

‘You can check out, but you can never leave.’ Does any other line encapsulate more succinctly the current situation? You can say your goodbyes, pack your bags, pay your bill (and boy, did Britain pay her bill – £23billion-odd so far, and more to come) but at the end of the day you’ll end up right back where you started. Ultimately, there’s no escaping the tendrils of the EU.

As the full extent of Keir Starmer’s surrender to Brussels became clear this week, that song played on a loop in my mind. ‘We are just prisoners here/of our own device.’ Well, their device, actually.

The photograph of Starmer and Ursula von der Leyen on the front of today's Daily Mail perfectly encapsulated their moment of victory.

She covers her mouth with her hand as she whispers conspiratorially in his direction. He bows his head, listening intently, a smile playing on his lips. It’s a snapshot of pure self-satisfied elitist smuggery, two career bureaucrats sharing a chuckle, knowing they’ve stuck it to voters by circumventing democracy and imposing their superior will (as they see it) via the back door.

This is the modern, acceptable face of authoritarianism. No jackboots or gerrymandering, no placards or pitchforks or launching tentpoles through the windows of Whitehall. No need.

Big budgets and back channels: that’s how you subvert democracy in plain sight, right underneath the noses of voters, who – poor saps – are still labouring under the misguided impression that if they vote for someone or something, that is what they will get. Hark, is that the sound of hollow laughter I hear?

To be fair, this was always the Remainer plan. Pay lip service to the result of the Referendum but meanwhile work hard behind the scenes to subvert it. The vote was never the end of it for them, merely the start of guerilla warfare.

As someone who was very close to the action in the run up to the vote, I always knew this. I have a memory of coming into the office the day after the Brexit vote and saying to a colleague who was flushed with the excitement of the victory: ‘Yes, it’s amazing – if they let it happen.’

Sir Keir Starmer with European Commision President Ursula von der Leyen on Monday

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, confused. ‘Who’s “they”?’ I didn’t quite know how to explain it then, but now I don’t need to. This is what I meant. This war of attrition, this chipping away, this death by a thousand cuts, this surrender – and ultimately, this betrayal of what the British people chose, foolishly believing democracy was a concept that still had any relevance in their lives.

It was naive to think it would turn out any other way. It will be ten years since the referendum next June – and the Remainers’ revenge has almost come full circle. When David Cameron stepped down that fateful morning after the vote, he set in motion the cogs that would eventually lead to the frustration of the vote. Whether by design or accident, his resignation triggered a series of events that were to ensure Brexit was hobbled from the very start.

The psycho drama that unfolded over the course of that subsequent week – in which I was swept up, since my ex-husband Michael Gove and Boris Johnson clashed as a result of the fallout – resulted in a fundamental schism within the Brexit camp and the withdrawal of Boris from the race to succeed Cameron.

There followed the worst possible outcome: the election of Theresa May as Conservative Leader, if anything more of a Remainer than Cameron himself – only with considerably less charm and political acumen.

She botched the negotiations via her disastrous ‘Chequers’ plan and, by the time Johnson finally got his hands on the tiller, he was faced with an impossible situation, boxed in on a number of fronts. He fought back valiantly, and eventually got a deal over the line, but it was messy and suboptimal – and certainly very far from what most voters had envisioned.

Still, at least he was committed to the principle. But with him gone, Brexit no longer had its champion.

As much as anything else, Starmer came to power on a silent Remainer ticket. I know many former Conservative voters who were prepared to hold their noses and compromise on principle on the tacit understanding that he would affect a ‘rapprochement’ with Brussels. He never dared say it – and indeed, protested quite the opposite; but it was the great unspoken truth of last year’s general election.

'Brexit cost me my friends, my sanity and arguably my marriage. But at least I’m not a fisherman,' says Sarah Vine

And so it has come to pass. No matter that along the way he’s wreaked political havoc with the lives of pensioners, farmers, small businesses – and more. Remainers don’t care about all that. The important thing is that now little Phoebe can have a proper French au pair, and the passport queues at Pisa Airport won’t be so devilishly long. Which is so missing the point.

It feels as though the whole damn nightmare was for nothing – which from a purely personal point of view is somewhat tiresome since Brexit cost me my friends, my sanity and arguably my marriage. But at least I’m not a fisherman.

As for the rest of the British people who voted for independence from Europe, an end to mass migration, sovereignty, freedom from the laws of Brussels – it must feel like the ultimate two-finger salute of an unelected elite that never really had any intention of letting them ‘take back control’.

An elite who right from the get-go did everything in their power to ensure that Brexit would be a failure. An elite who, unable to win fair and square at the ballot box, then deployed a million different establishment levers to manipulate the politics and the narrative so that, ultimately, we would end up where we are today, bending over backwards to rejoin the bully-boy gang in Brussels.

From my point of view, I’m not so much angry about this deal – which is by any standard appalling. There is just a weary predictability to it all, in the same way that there is a weary predictability to so much in politics these days.

Every time something sensible happens – such as, for example, the Supreme Court ruling on what it means to be a woman – the vested interests fight back tooth and nail, everyone loses their nerve and things go back to being bonkers, only even more so.

Meanwhile, good people get shafted by a system that’s stacked against them from the start – and elections and democracy in general become ever more abstract concepts, more performative politics than anything with real relevance. After all, why bother voting if the outcome is not going to be respected? In that respect, Remainers have more in common with Donald Trump than they realise.

It’s hard to see a way out, or a way forward. Yes, theoretically voters could punish Starmer at the polls and theoretically an incoming government could reverse these directives, and others. But the chances of not getting bogged down in the legal weeds – which have been carefully planted below the waterline to anchor us to Brussels – are remote.

No, this is the way Brexit ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.