By invoking the Nazis and spewing hate, Remoaners are sinking into the gutter . . .

Some people will never take Paddy Ashdown seriously after the former Lib Dem leader said he would ‘publicly eat my hat on your programme’ if the exit polls predicting a Tory victory in the 2015 election were correct.

The polls, of course, were completely right, but Paddy didn’t fulfil his undertaking. He had been instantly proved wrong, and wasn’t prepared to take even a small bite from his headgear or offer a proper apology, though he did later, by way of a gimmick, consume a chocolate hat. His foolishness was perfectly illuminated in a matter of hours.

Yet despite this, I’m still inclined to take Lord Ashdown seriously, partly because he has been leader of a political party, and also ran Bosnia on behalf of the United Nations during the early 2000s. even more important, to my mind, are his 13 years as an officer in the Royal marines.

A man who has served Queen and country — and by most accounts the young Paddy Ashdown got into some pretty tight scrapes — should not be easily written off despite revealing himself as a chump on live television.

So when he draws comparisons between contemporary Britain and Nazi Germany, as he did at the Hay Festival on Tuesday, my strong inclination is not to dismiss him as a lightweight whose views can be safely ignored.

For what Paddy said is the latest example of the hysterical language used by some extreme Remainers following last June’s referendum. one can sympathise with their disappointment, of course, and appreciate their worries about the future.

But I’d argue that such unhinged talk — often accompanied by large dollops of vitriol — is not just silly but also potentially dangerous. Isn’t it a mark of extremist politicians to paint political opponents in the most lurid terms? Nice, liberal Paddy Ashdown is sinking to the politics of the gutter. WHILE promoting his new book about World War II, he said he was ‘horrified by the parallels’ with the Third Reich. He wasn’t suggesting that Hitler was ‘around the corner’ — God forbid! — although ‘you might conclude that the conditions for something like that to emerge are there’.

All this echoes what he told the Guardian newspaper last September. He recalled how after the referendum result he told his wife: ‘ It’s not our country any more.’ There was ‘ something really nasty . . . a monster below the placid surface of British life’.

on that occasion he also equated Josef Goebbels’ malign propaganda machine, which specialised in telling lies, with the contention repeated by Boris Johnson and others that ‘ we send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund the NHS instead’.

Whatever our feelings about the rights and wrongs of that slogan — and I think it was somewhat misleading — it is surely verging on lunacy to draw even the faintest comparison between the bumbling and generally decent figure of poor Boris and the wicked genocidal maniac Josef Goebbels.

As Paddy has written a book about World War II, he really should try to digest a few basic facts about Nazi Germany, to which he is prepared to liken Brexit Britain. I can’t see they have anything whatsoever in common.

Hitler’s Germany was a militaristic regime which invaded its neighbours. Dissenters were persecuted or imprisoned. Six million Jews were murdered in appalling circumstances. There was no free Press or open debate. opposition was outlawed.

How can a serious person with a brain in his head pretend that post- Referendum Britain (which, by the way, is engaged in a free and open election in which Paddy Ashdown’s Lib Dems are promoting their policies) bears the slightest resemblance to the most evil and perverted government that has ever existed?

The comparison is crazy. But Paddy is not a batty, one-man band raging in isolation. Far from it. A few months ago, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Ian mcewan ploughed a similar furrow when making a speech in Spain. He described the decision to hold a referendum on Brexit as reminiscent of Nazi Germany.

Did he also think the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence smacked of Nazism? He didn’t say. Nor did he draw a distinction between democratic referenda openly contested and fascist ones in the Thirties which offered no true choice and enjoyed no free debate. The confusion is regrettable in so intelligent a man.

Three weeks ago, mcewan suggested in another speech that the death of many elderly Brexit voters over the next two years would help swing a second referendum in favour of Britain staying in europe. Actually, he’s almost certainly wrong. A recent YouGov poll suggested that 69 per cent of people now want Brexit to go ahead as against 21 per cent who don’t. But let’s leave that aside for the moment.

What was particularly disturbing is that mcewan seemed almost to look forward to the prospective deaths of ‘1.5 million oldsters’ who would be ‘ freshly in their graves’ because their demise ( he mistakenly believes) would give him the outcome he wants.

TO ACHIEVE this end, the views — even the lives — of his fellow countrymen can be cheerfully sacrificed.

contempt for ordinary voters who voted Brexit, and hatred for those politicians and journalists who argued in favour of it, are increasingly evident in many of the diatribes unleashed by intransigent and angry Remainers.

The other week, I wrote about the partly factually incorrect anti-Brexit effusions of another of our leading novelists, Julian Barnes, in the London Review of Books.

I didn’t mention then that Barnes related how, after the polls closed on June 23, he asked like-minded guests at dinner which pro- Brexit politician would be the biggest hate figure for them if the verdict was to leave. Boris Johnson received seven votes, while Barnes himself opted for Nigel Farage.

Now there is nothing wrong about friends discussing their political animosities in private. But Barnes should not have advertised this hatred in the public arena. This is not the language of civilised discourse which leftish intellectuals such as Julian Barnes claim to cherish.

There’s a laughable example of abuse in the current London Review of Books, with another anti-Brexit novelist, Andrew o’Hagan, accusing the mail ( which he regards as the epicentre of the Brexit cause) of being full of venom. He seems blithely unaware that his own splenetic and hate- fuelled utterances embody the very characteristics he claims to find in this newspaper.

And this, it seems to me, touches on the crux of the matter. confronted with a democratic result they don’t like and won’t accept, a hard core of high-minded Remainers descend terrifyingly quickly to the brutish invective of the political street fighter.

Apart from everything else, they are going to make themselves terribly unhappy if they continue to howl and convulse about a referendum which, unless Jeremy corbyn lands up in Number 10, hasn’t the faintest chance of ever being re-run. But that is not my main concern.

No, my worry is that by ludicrously invoking the Third Reich and spewing hatred, Remainers debase the political process. It would obviously be ludicrous to call Paddy Ashdown or Ian mcewan fascist — as ludicrous as making an equivalence between Josef Goebbels and Boris Johnson.

But they should be more careful. They are in danger of resembling just a little the monsters they invoke. After all, wild hyperbole, vicious abuse and vulgar name- calling are calling cards that fascists like.