Stephen Pollard

in the national interest.” It may be pure madness but Mr Benn and his fellow Remoaners are neither mad nor idiots.

They know exactly that they are doing and precisely how damaging it would be. That is the whole point.

Mr Benn is a passionate, hardcore EU fanatic who is determined to do everything in his power to frustrate the referendum result. And his committee will almost certainly be dominated by similar types. It will be made up of 21 MPs: 10 Tories, five Labour, three SNP and one each of the Lib Dem, Green and Democratic Unionist parties. Given that most MPs were Remainers, when the party whips appoint the committee members, we can be sure there will be a Remain majority. The only issue is how large it will be.

Be clear what Mr Benn and his ilk are up to: they do not want us to leave the EU and that is putting it mildly. They will do everything in their power to stop us leaving.

Some of them, such as veteran Europhile Ken Clarke on BBC One’s Question Time this week, are so openly contemptuous of the British public that they dismiss the referendum as an “opinion poll”.

But others, like Mr Benn, are cleverer. They realise they can’t openly reject the result

THAT is of course exactly how the EU elites have always reacted to defeat. They go into full-on scare mode and demand – and then usually get – another vote. They are trying the same tactics with us, which is why those tactics have to be exposed for what they really are: contempt for democracy disguised as buttressing it.

There is a clue to all this in Mr Benn’s words this week, with an apparently innocuous remark about the single market which is actually telling: “There are some very basic questions. ‘What do you want to do to try to ensure we have access to the single market that is so important to our goods and services industries?’”

You see what he is doing? He is referring to the single market as if it is a given that membership of the single market should be the defining characteristic of a Brexit deal.

First, Brexit really does mean Brexit – which means we leave the EU and its institutions lock, stock and barrel. But more importantly he is using the deeply misleading word “access” to the single market.

Everyone has access to it. We have access to it as EU members, the US, Africa, China and Japan do. Even Cuba and Iran have access to the single market.

The issue is not whether we have access but on what terms. And it is those terms that Mr Benn and his ilk are trying to ruin.

‘Revealing plans will destroy our strategy’