Brexit can work. All it needs is a proper BRITISH compromise

LOYAL Tories who have long admired Lord Heseltine have been shocked by his extraordinary suggestion that a Jeremy Corbyn government would be ‘less damaging’ to Britain than leaving the EU. But could his wild outburst actually be a good thing? It provides a chance for sensible, patriotic people on both sides of the EU divide to combine for a proper British compromise, instead of tearing each other’s throats out.

For Lord Heseltine is not sensible. His behaviour comes as no surprise to me. He has been for many years something of a fanatic, often closer to the Labour Left than to the Tory Party to which he officially belongs.

I do not exaggerate. Like some 1930s world-government utopian, he thinks countries such as Britain are finished.

He said, back in 2004: ‘The nation states have had their day as powers. The world must be more ordered and centralised… it’s unstoppable and irreversible’.

He said this in the midst of explaining why Britain should have abolished the pound without a vote, because Fleet Street would have ‘pandered to the worst and basest instincts of the mass of people’.

Some of you may also recall him, on October 14, 1999, sitting happily at the side of the ghastly Blair creature in a huge Imax cinema in London, emphasising that his support for the EU project was so strong that he didn’t mind consorting with the Labour leader. As for the ‘disaster’ of leaving the EU, Lord Heseltine has never ceased to support the abolition of the pound sterling. This position was not just politically outrageous. We now know, from watching the dire effects of the euro on most of Europe’s economies, that it would have been economically disastrous too.

Just in case you still harbour any delusions that he is, deep down, a traditional conservative, note that he said in 2001: ‘Marital breakdown, single-parent families, partners, gay rights, a multi-ethnic population are all parts of modern life. Whether for good or ill scarcely matters.’

Scarcely matters? Whether you like or dislike these things, or even whether you would lump them together in this way (as I would not), they matter hugely. To say they ‘scarcely matter’ is surely to say that you are in general in favour of the Blairite cultural revolution.

I know plenty of Labour people who are more patriotic, and more conservative, than this.

Lord Heseltine speaks for those who genuinely believe that this country would be better off ruled from elsewhere and he has never hidden it, though he must have realised that the Tory conference crowds who used to cheer him did not understand what his true desires are.

Such fanatics have always been at the heart of the EU project. This is why sensible, independentminded Switzerland would never join the EU’s political institutions, however closely she trades with her EU neighbours. The Swiss, much like us, value their own unique laws and traditions and don’t want them replaced by a committee in Brussels.

It is why Norway, which had so recently won her independence, and then endured a cruel foreign occupation, decided to stay out. And it is why, in the end, a majority in this country voted to leave.

Most of that majority are perfectly happy with a Swiss or Norway-style compromise, in which we trade sensibly and keep our borders as open as possible.

So, I believe, are many Remainers. It is only the wild zealots on both sides who demand all-ornothing outcomes, at any cost.

Push aside the Heseltines and their Leaver equivalents, and make a practical deal whose main aims are liberty, prosperity and happiness, not some wild, doomed utopia of total free trade or world government.