It distresses me to use such a word about as distinguished a man as Lord Heseltine, but on Brexit he’s a BIGOT

WERE I to be granted a wish for 2018, it would be that fanatical Remainers stop prophesying Armageddon when — they usually say if — Britain leaves the European Union.

So unremitting are their forecasts of doom, so lacking in hope, that one almost feels they want the catastrophe to happen so that they can be proved right about Brexit.

The latest, and hitherto most extreme, intervention comes from Michael Heseltine, the former Tory deputy prime minister, and a lifelong ardent Europhile. He has said in a podcast that Brexit could be more damaging to the country than a Corbyn government (a suggestion which yesterday led to calls from fellow Tories for him to lose the party whip).

The first thing to say about this latest lunatic act of star-gazing is that — as is usual with Tory panjandrum arch-pessimists — no reason is given for the calamity that supposedly awaits our leaving the EU. It is baldly stated as fact, without explanation.

Perhaps Lord Heseltine and fellow Tory doom merchants such as Lord (Chris) Patten (who earlier this year called Brexit ‘the biggest disaster in modern British politics’) think we are too stupid to grasp the complexities of the argument.

We are asked to take on trust that life outside the EU will be a cataclysm, just as for years we were asked to take on trust by Lords Heseltine and Patten and the third member of the Tory triumvirate, Ken Clarke, that life inside the EU was an unalloyed blessing — not that most of us had ever noticed.

Indeed, Michael Heseltine is so wildly pro-EU that he recommended British membership of the single currency while it was causing havoc in the eurozone. Only three months ago, he assured The Independent that the UK ‘will one day join the euro’, while suggesting that we might never leave the EU.

But this time he has really shot his bolt in saying it would be preferable to have Corbyn in charge than to leave the EU. As the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg says: ‘It shows how deepseated his love for the EU is that he would rather bankrupt the nation than leave it.’ FOR

Lord Heseltine well knows the damage Jeremy Corbyn would cause, having lived throughout the dismal, strike-ridden, inflation- stricken Seventies, when a Labour government that was a much paler version of Corbyn succeeded in laying waste to the economy.

Being a highly successful businessman, he understands better than almost anyone the harmful effects much higher corporate taxes would have on UK companies. Foreign investment would dry up, and the pound plunge. As one banker wittily put it, Britain under Corbyn would be ‘Cuba without the sunshine’.

With a fortune of around £300 million, Lord Heseltine would be on the receiving end of confiscatory wealth and property taxes being planned by Corbyn with his hard- line comrade-in-arms, John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor.

Possibly it is to his credit that he would rather jeopardise his fine country house with its impressive arboretum than suffer the torments of leaving the EU. But is he being fair to the rest of us? I don’t think so.

The last thing this country needs is a disastrous experiment in Marxist economics. It is not the rich such as Heseltine who would suffer most from Corbyn’s inevitable depredations, but those on middling incomes, and the poor.

How on earth can an intelligent man, who has done much good for his country, believe that ruinous Corbynomics are preferable to leaving the EU, which even he can’t be sure constitutes a one-way ticket to the apocalypse?

It’s curious how Tories such as Heseltine, Clarke and Chris Patten — who take pride in their sophistication and pragmatism while mocking Tory Eurosceptics as ‘ head bangers’ and ‘ swivel- eyed loons’ — have themselves become blinkered ideologues.

The ideal of Europe as represented by the EU must be defended at all costs and in all circumstances. They don’t explain or justify it, but simply assert its superiority — and continue to do so even after a majority of their fellow countrymen have voted to leave.

So fanatical are these people (we should add the infamous names of Tony Blair and former EU Commissioner Peter Mandelson) that they turn a deaf ear to their own democratic principles in refusing to accept the outcome of the referendum, though to be fair to Ken Clarke he appears to regard a re-run as unfeasible.

Like most ideologues, they have become divorced from reality. It seems not to occur to them that if the result were finagled, and the votes of 17.4 million people disregarded, there would in all likelihood be a split deeper and more damaging than anything we have so far seen.

It is the lack of realism that is so shocking, the unwillingness in normally practical politicians to accept that the majority of the country, having listened to the arguments, does not accept their preconceptions about the European Union. GEORGE

OSBORNE, who as Chancellor led the Remainers’ ‘ Project Fear’, is another member of this out-of-touch tribe. On Tuesday he said there was no need to ‘radically clamp down on immigration’ after Brexit.

This was his way of saying that Britain should stay in the single market, or be closely aligned to it, and thereby accept large inflows of EU migrants over which we would have little or no control.

After all that has happened, it is amazing that so worldly a politician as Mr Osborne can believe that the British people can be bamboozled on this point. Why won’t he respect most people’s wish to regain control of our borders?

Actually, there are plenty of Remainers who don’t persist in pretending that the result of the referendum can be reversed, and believe that life post-Brexit won’t turn into the tragedy Lord Heseltine foresees.

One such appears to be Lord Macpherson, who, as permanent secretary at the Treasury, was Mr Osborne’s right-hand man and collaborator in Project Fear, which promised an immediate recession and an emergency tax-raising Budget, neither of which happened. Now Lord Macpherson declares that the economic impact of Brexit will be ‘limited’ if the Government seizes domestic policy opportunities and ‘looks forward, not back’. His meaning is a bit cloudy, but this former doomsayer is at least attempting to look on the bright side.

Why can’t Michael Heseltine and the rest of them do the same? If only they could take off their blinkers, which they have been wearing for several decades, they might come to see that the future holds exciting possibilities. And how much happier they would be!

Meanwhile, the former deputy prime minister should reflect that if he continues to stir the pot, and to tell us that Corbyn is preferable to Brexit, the more likely it is that the nightmarish hard-Left government he invokes will come to pass.

Is there any hope that he will change his ways? It’s very hard to persuade a bigot to change his mind. It distresses me to use such a word to describe so distinguished man as Lord Heseltine, but that is what he has become so far as the EU is concerned.

He is 84, and seemingly hale and hearty, I’m glad to say. Our best hope is that this entrenched pessimist will live to see his miserable expectations utterly confounded.