Brexit snub for business boss who said Leave

JOHN Longworth paid a heavy price for having the temerity to reveal he was voting to leave the EU when director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce.

In a keynote speech at the BCC conference last March, the seasoned businessman shredded David Cameron’s feeble negotiation package.

He said: ‘The people of our country face a choice, between staying in what is essentially an unreformed EU with the eurozone moving off in another direction, and with Britain sitting on the margins, or leaving the EU with all the near-term uncertainty and disruption that this will cause.’

Having confirmed he was voting to leave, the control freaks in Cameron’s Downing Street swung into action, and Longworth ended up feeling he had to resign.

Longworth is a former director of Tesco, Asda Walmart, the UK India Council and Margaret Thatcher government’s deregulation task force, plus he chairs Leave Means Leave ( which campaigns for a ‘clean’ Brexit).

With that eminent background, he would surely be an obvious contender for a plum post at the new Department for Exiting the EU. But now I hear from friends that four months after he applied to join the executive board, he’s been rejected without an interview or even a telephone call.

Yet over at Liam Fox’s International Trade department they have given a directorship to Simon Walker, former head of the Institute of Directors, who was an ardent Remainer.

Longworth initially refused to comment about the snub, but later told me: ‘Perhaps they thought I was too much in favour of exiting the EU to have oversight over the Department for Exiting the EU! However, we will never know as there was no conversation, no interview and no feedback.’

Some things don’t change in the Whitehall old boys’ network.