WHY WE MUST LEAVE

SINCE the start of the referendum campaign, Remain supporters – led by the Prime Minister – have tried to portray those who want to leave the EU as dishonest, deluded, or downright mad. Last week for example, Chancellor George Osborne sneeringly described Brexit campaigners as a bunch of conspiracy theorists who believe he and Mr Cameron are ‘part of a global stitchup’ aimed at terrifying British voters into sticking with Brussels.

‘The next thing you know they will be accusing us of faking the moon landings, kidnapping Shergar, and covering up the existence of the Loch Ness Monster,’ he said. All highly amusing of course, but will they use the same language about the latest recruit to the Leave camp?

Steve Hilton, Mr Cameron’s closest friend in politics, godfather to one of his children, his former strategy chief and the man who persuaded him to stand as party leader declares in today’s Mail that the EU has been ‘corruptly captured’ by a self-serving elite and that Britain can only thrive by being outside it.

In a shattering blow to his former boss, Mr Hilton says the UK is ‘ungovernable’ as a democratic country inside the EU, which has become ‘so complicated, so secretive, so impenetrable that it’s way beyond the ability of any British government to make it work to our advantage’. Unlike some of the superannuated former Tory advisers wheeled out by Remain, Mr Hilton was until recently at the very heart of government. Known as Mr Cameron’s ‘policy guru’, he is the ultimate Downing Street insider.

So he has seen with his own eyes how Brussels stifles enterprise, trade and competition. He describes how it works for big business and against democracy and concludes it will never reform.

Doesn’t this searingly honest analysis put the scaremongering of the Remain camp to shame? For all their apocalyptic warnings of economic meltdown and mass unemployment, they have still not put forward a positive case for staying in the EU.

By contrast, here is Mr Hilton’s positive case for getting out. ‘I believe it is [about] taking back power from arrogant, unaccountable, hubristic elites and putting it where it belongs – in people’s hands.’ Does that sound deluded, or just democratic?