‘Brexit? It’s been so badly handled and sold on a pack of lies’

IT’S ALMOST six months to the day since Theresa May’s ill-fated snap election sent shockwaves through the political establishment. In the space of one night more than 60 MPs lost their seat, with Labour claiming one of the biggest scalps of the night when it ousted the former Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg from his Sheffield Hallam seat of 12 years with a little-known candidate who was subsequently suspended from the party.

Many politicians would respond to a knock-back of this magnitude by retreating from the public gaze and taking some time out to lick their wounds. But as a dyed-in-the-wool democrat, Mr Clegg chose to come out fighting – and it will come as no surprise to those familiar with the passionate Europhile that he has set his sights on Brexit.

The 50-year-old spent the months following the election putting the final touches to his new book

a cross between a political think-piece and an instruction manual for those desperate to find a way to reverse the UK’s seemingly inescapable exit from the EU.

True to Mr Clegg’s previous line of anti-Brexit argument, the book is uncompromising in its criticism of Leave figureheads like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, and unapologetic in railing against the result of the June 2016 referendum. Speaking to

at the beginning of a week in which the Government effectively found itself hostage to the DUP over its plans to avoid a hard border with Ireland, he is initially reluctant to put too firm a figure on the probability of halting the exit process. But eventually he agrees to “break his rule” on offering percentages and settles on “25 per cent and rising”.

“Peter Mandelson put it very nicely, [when he said] Brexit may end up defeating Brexit,” he explains. “It’s been so badly handled, it’s been sold on such a pack of lies and people’s expectations are running so far ahead of what is realistically possible, that you would’ve thought at some point there’s going to be a major collision which may allow us – particularly young people who didn’t vote for this at all – to say ‘hang on a minute let’s think again’.”

“I still put most of my money on there just being a bad deal,” he adds as a caution. “A rotten deal in which we end up coughing up money, still abiding by European rulings and have a rubbish trade deal in return.

“[That’s] almost entirely due to the fact that Theresa May and the Conservatives took this unilateral decision, which they didn’t need to, not only to take us out of the European Union but to throw the baby out with the bathwater and also take us out of the single market and customs union.”

Somewhere on the spectrum between these two possible outcomes, he notes that there is also a chance that negotiation will result in “a very acrimonious falling apart” and the UK “crashing out”. He places much of the blame for such a scenario on “unblinking fanatics on the Brexit extremes”, pointing to figures like Iain Duncan Smith and John Redwood, who advocate walking away from talks altogether and “becoming a sort of legally rogue state”.

Antagonistic phrases like “fanatics” and “boneheaded attack dogs” (a term of endearment he reserves for members of the right-wing press) are used frequently in the new book and in Mr Clegg’s antiBrexit rhetoric more generally. But asked whether he feels this is helpful in overcoming divisions