Tim Newark

we, Mr Major? To be honest, as an independent nation free to make alliances beyond the EU, we’ll have more ability to balance Franco-German power, rather than being their compliant poodles in Brussels.

Then there’s the usual Remainer bleating that we were a “deceived population” in 2016 unable to understand the true nature of Brexit. We were too stupid to see the lies being peddled to us. How patronising is that? And what about the lies touted to us by Mr Major after he betrayed our national interests by signing the Maastricht Treaty in 1992? Three years later, in January 1995, he declared in an interview: “I think the high tide of [EU] centralism, of federalism as I have called it, in Europe has reached its zenith and is now declining… The way in which it will develop in the future, I believe will not be as a centralist monolith and we are not interested in it developing as a centralist monolith.”

Well, he got that wrong, didn’t he? After the Maastricht Treaty, Brussels bureaucrats pressed ahead with their desire for a single currency, a single economy, a single foreign policy and a single EU army with all the smaller nations marching to the monolithic drumbeat of the Germans and French. Let us not forget either that it was

MRS MAY’S Chequers plan was a readymade compromise and that seems to have suited no one. The reality is that John Major is a fully signed up EUmaniac and will say and do anything to pursue a fantasy that is not in the best interests of this nation or reflective of the biggest exercise in direct democracy in recent years.

It has not been a distinguished week for prominent Remainers. Pro-EU MPs are lining up to defend Speaker of the House John Bercow and an endemic culture of bullying in order to ensure he stays in position so as to lend his anti-Brexit influence to any knife-edge votes in Parliament. Is that what it has come to?

MPs and ex-PMs such as John Major need to learn to respect democracy and understand that their job is simply to enact our national will, not seek to frustrate it.

If Parliament is seen to be out of step with the voter, it will pay a heavy price and Sir John – who abhors extremes – will push us into the arms of more pugnacious politicians who deliver on their promises. It is already happening in the rest of his beloved EU.

‘Sold our sovereignty down the river’