COMMENT

THIS country has long grown used to Lord Heseltine’s starry-eyed love affair with the European Union. But when the 8 -year-old Tory grandee suggests Brexit would do more damage than a Corbyn-led government, it is surely time to summon the men in white coats.

THIS country has long grown used to Lord Heseltine’s starry-eyed love affair with the European Union. But when the 84-year-old Tory grandee suggests Brexit would do more damage than a Corbyn- led government, it is surely time to summon the men in white coats.

True, ‘Tarzan’ admits Jeremy Corbyn would cause harm in No 10. But he loftily adds: ‘ We have survived Labour governments before. Their damage tends to be short- term and capable of rectification. Brexit is not short-term and is not easily capable of rectification.’

Leave aside Lord Heseltine’s patronising insistence that the public’s decision to leave needs to be ‘rectified’ – echoed yesterday by George Osborne, who now says voters should never have been consulted in the first place.

Forget, too, that Project Fear’s prophecies of catastrophe, orchestrated by the former chancellor, show no sign of coming true.

Indeed, experts at the Centre for Economics and Business Research have become the latest to admit they’d been far too pessimistic about Brexit – and now predict Britain’s economy will overtake France in the year after we withdraw.

Wasn’t it Lord Heseltine who famously swung the Commons mace in 1976, in furious protest over Labour’s plan to nationalise parts of the aerospace and shipbuilding industries?

How can he now so lightly dismiss the carnage Mr Corbyn would cause, with his half-baked Marxist plans for wholesale state takeovers and massive borrowing?

Don’t take the Mail’s word for it. Listen to Terry Scuoler, outgoing head of the politically neutral Engineering Employers’ Federation, which represents the country’s biggest manufacturers.

Warning that Labour’s policy initiatives are likely to be ‘the thin end of a hardline socialist wedge’, he says a government under Mr Corbyn is a ‘ nightmarish prospect’ for the business world.

As for Lord Heseltine, Mr Osborne and Co, they are quick enough to prophesy disaster from Brexit, while expressing disdain for those who voted Leave.

But 18 months after the referendum, they have yet to explain what they like about the EU, with its business- crushing, unelected bureaucracy, barriers to external trade and increasing internal unrest over unrestricted migration.

We await the answer with bated breath.