‘BoJo should go to jail over campaign’

Senior Tory hits out at Brexit claims

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson deserves to go to prison for the way he campaigned for Brexit, according to George Osborne’s former adviser James Chapman BORIS Johnson deserves to go to prison because of the way he campaigned during the EU referendum.

That’s the verdict of a former senior Conservative, James Chapman.

Mr Chapman, pictured below, was former Tory Chancellor George Osborne’s special adviser, which meant it was his job to explain Mr Osborne’s thinking to the media.

He went on to work for David Davis, the Brexit Secretary.

But now he’s left the government, and he’s angry about Brexit.

He says an “effective” electoral law would jail people for saying things that aren’t true.

And he highlighted the claim on the “Leave” campaign bus, which ferried Boris Johnson around the country, that quitting the EU would free up £350m a week for the NHS.

That’s not the only thing Mr Chapman is suggesting.

He says the Tories will never win another election because Prime Minister Theresa May’s approach to Brexit will “take the economy off a cliff”.

Labour has also been taken over by the “fringe” - a reference to leader Jeremy Corbyn - says Mr Chapman.

And he argues the Liberal Democrats are pretty much finished too, based on recent election results.

His solution is to create a new party, which he says should be called the Democrats.

Perhaps there’s some logic to this. Labour has shifted to the left. It’s also true that Labour and the Conservatives have a similar approach to Brexit. Both insist on leaving the single market and ending freedom of movement, even though we could quit the EU without doing this .

Maybe there’s a vacancy for a party which aims for the centre ground and wants to reverse Brexit, or at least to aim for a “softer” version of it.

But something similar happened in the 1980s, when Labour moderates, and a few Tories, formed a pro-EU party called the Social Democratic Party (SDP).

It won 25 per cent of the vote in 1983, in alliance with the Liberal Party. But that was only enough to give it 23 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, as a result of how our election system works.

A number of MPs switched parties and joined the SDP. But the next time an election came - and they tried standing as SDP candidates - most were defeated.

The SDP isn’t the only reason today’s politicians are unlikely to try forming a new party. But it’s certainly an experience they won’t want to repeat.