He stood there in the crypt like some creepy undertaker

Watches ex-PM serve a banquet of duplicity

TO a crypt deep inside Somerset House, off the Strand, to hear that wellknown election asset and wife-cheater Sir John Major preach against Brexit. We were soon served a banquet of the richest, most jellied hypocrisies. Oh yes.

Mrs May should offer Parliament a free vote, said the man who physically steered MPs through the lobbies to save his skin on the Maastricht Treaty (which Ken Clarke never read). MPs should listen to their beliefs, not to party Whips, said the man who raged so petulantly against eurosceptic ‘bastards’ in his Cabinet in the 1990s. The noble intellectuals of the House of Lords should ignore the public and be guided by their consciences. Talk of ‘consciences’ from the sticky adulterer!

Sir John himself has never been fagged to enter the Upper House. you have to publish details of your income if you are a peer. Sir John has over the years coined it in big time from an American investment firm. By the way, did you know this sometime afternoon hip-jiggler is a patron of British Gymnastics? Isn’t it perfect?

Former prime minister Sir John, whose speech may or may not be part of an organised PR front by Tony Blair’s Remainers, was speaking at an event promoting the creative industries.

Before his contribution we were spoonfed some stuff about how those creative businesses depended on talent from the european Union. Without eU poets and playwrights and pop stars and fashion designers, little Britain would apparently soon revert to the cultural dark ages. All this was lapped up by an audience of sleek metropolitan 30-somethings who plainly, at 2pm on a snowy Wednesday, had no work to attend.

In the middle of these youngsters, like a pied piper, sat Peter Mandelson’s friend Roland Rudd, the multi-zillionaire City PR man, arch-europhile and brother of the Home Secretary.

Sir John claimed he was ‘neither a europhile nor a eurosceptic’ but ‘a realist’ who opposed Brexit. ‘Of course,’ he said magnanimously, ‘the “will of the people” can’t be ignored, but Parliament has a duty also to consider the “wellbeing of the people”.’ And with that he was into the patronising cliche about ‘ no one voted for higher prices’. He continued: ‘I know of no precedent for any Government enacting a policy that will make both our country and our people poorer.’

IDO. It was called the exchange rate mechanism and it was pursued, disastrously, by some idiot of a PM in the early 1990s simply out of dogmatic attachment to the eU. The name of that dimwit? Major.

Sir John, who was never much liked by George Bush Snr or Bill Clinton, said