SIR KEIR STARMER draws a horizontal line. He labels its left end the World Trade Organisation and its right end the European Union’s single market. “We want to be as close to that as possible,” he says, circling the second. “Trade and services without impediment, common regulation.” Immediately to the left of the circle he draws a box with swift, straight strokes. “That’s where we want to be,” he says. But what does it mean? Three horizontal lines shoot across the page. He labels the top one “peace and security”, the next “jobs and growth” and the lowest “immigration controls”. “This is the public’s order of priorities”, he replies, squaring his notepad with the edge of table. Striking out the second two labels and reversing them, he adds: “but I worry the government thinks this.”

Taking coffee with Sir Keir in the Berlin headquarters of the BDI, Germany’s main business association, Bagehot was impressed. Whatever the subject, Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary, opposing a cagey Tory government, will identify the factual bedrock, grind it into dust, shape it into bricks, enumerate them and carefully erect a neat, logical, impenetrable wall of argument. Little more than a month into the job, he has already put a list of 170 questions about Brexit to ministers. If the Supreme Court rejects the government’s Article 50 appeal and insists that Parliament must have a say before Britain’s two-year Brexit talks are triggered, he will become a big name in European politics.

On paper Sir Keir is poorly suited to the job. He became MP for Holborn and St Pancras only in May 2015, at 52. His prospects looked bright. A good friend of Ed Miliband (the former Labour leader, who joined him in Berlin), he would now be foreign or justice secretary had his party won. But now he is on the wrong side of most prevailing trends. As a human-rights lawyer, he has defended alleged terrorists and David Shayler, a whistleblowing spook; advocated an easing of right-to-die laws; and spoken out for judges. As director of public prosecutions, he oversaw trials of journalists accused of bribing public officials for stories. As an MP he represents a metropolitan finger of London that begins in the West End, takes in Bloomsbury, King’s Cross and St Pancras and ends with Kentish Town and Highgate—a seat where council estates are interspersed with grand Victorian streets in which Labour posters dot the windows of houses worth millions of pounds. In an anti-expert, anti-liberal, anti-London age he is a red rag to populist bulls.

Yet in practice he is an excellent choice for the job. Three decades at the Bar have made him a crisp communicator, free of the abstract nouns and management jargon that infect the speech of other Labour moderates. Asked about the meaning of Donald Trump he echoes Zhou Enlai’s supposed take on the French Revolution: “it’s too early to tell.” In an age of braggarts and posers, he is content to deal in modest truths. Despite his name—his parents chose it in tribute to Keir Hardie, Labour’s founder—he eschews tribalism and is close to liberal Tories like Andrew Tyrie and Dominic Grieve.

Moreover, where others would use the job as a platform for scoring points, Sir Keir considers himself a sort of national ombudsman. Brexit should not divide the 52% of Leavers from the 48% of Remainers, he says, but unite the 100% through a pragmatic deal in the middle of the spectrum. Hence his talk of using a parliamentary vote on Article 50 to “put grit in the machine” and his concern that the government’s Great Repeal Bill, which will transfer EU laws wholesale to the British statute book, may not be sufficiently scrutinised in Parliament. His one-nation instincts also explain his quest to calm expectations of Brexit—“the sovereignty that we gain will be for a millisecond between the signature that ends the major treaty and the signatures that enter the new treaties”—and to act as an interlocutor between London and other capitals (from Berlin, Sir Keir went on to Brussels).

Brobdingnagian hopes, human reality

Though impressed, your columnist has two concerns. The first is Sir Keir’s party politics. He may claim that Labour is “more united on Brexit than on any issue in recent history”, but its far-left leadership still sees the EU as a malign, capitalist plot. After their meeting in Berlin, Bagehot received a call from an aide to Sir Keir insisting that subsequent pro-Brexit comments by John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, did not reflect his boss’s views. This gap between the shadow Brexit secretary and his front-bench colleagues surely hints at the tensions that will explode during next year’s negotiations.

The second caveat is the sheer scale of Brexit. Many Remainers vest outsized hopes in Sir Keir. “He’s what stands between the government and a hard Brexit,” says one colleague. “Britain’s last Remaining hope”, bellows a headline on the Politico website. But that speaks to a delusion which should have died by now: that Brexit is a car with an accelerator, a brake and a steering wheel—a road-safe vehicle that individual politicians can control.

In fact the vote on June 23rd produced an intemperate, untameable animal. That much is evident in Sir Keir’s haunted air. He sports the demeanour of a man who has looked the giant in the eye and seen its size. It is also evident in the jitters of Brexiteers, whose disgust at the slightest suggestion of parliamentary scrutiny and whose perma-fury at unconvinced Remainer commentators reveals more than they would care to admit. Deep down, such politicos know the truth. Brexit is not a machine but a voluble beast. It combines a vague mandate from voters, a furious purism among diehards, a mind-achingly complicated bureaucratic exercise and a volatile international political and trading environment. Anyone who claims to know how the coming years will turn out is therefore talking rubbish. Sir Keir’s greatest virtue is that he seems to understand this. His keenest acolytes should follow suit.

Economist.com/blogs/bagehot