UKIP’s leader has slammed Tory House of Commons leader Andrea Leadsom as “two-faced” after leaks revealed she secretly “hates” Theresa May’s ‘Soft Brexit’ plan and thinks it betrays the EU referendum result.
Not only has the key figure in the official Brexit campaign not resigned from the Cabinet — unlike former Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson — but she has proceeded to defend and promote the plan to the British public.
“How can Andrea Leadsom look herself in the mirror, let alone toward the 17.4 million who voted Leave, when she is so two-faced,” Gerard Batten told Breitbart London on Saturday.
“She knows that the Prime Minister’s plan is a betrayal of Brexit. However, she chooses her career over her conscience and over the hopes of a betrayed nation.
“It just underlines the old adage, you should never trust a Tory – particularly over Brexit,” he blasted.
Mrs May’s Chequers plan for a ‘soft’ Brexit will keep the United Kingdom tied to all EU goods rules, severely limiting the nation’s ability to control trade policy, and reports suggest she could also retreat on migration, allowing “Free Movement by another name”.
Leaked minutes from the Chequers meeting, seen by The Times, reveal Mrs Leadsom accused the majority of her Cabinet colleges and other officials of “arrogance” during the debate, and claimed they had “Remainer tendencies”.
According to the newspaper, she also slammed Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip ‘Remainer Phil’ Hammond’s Treasury for its record on economic forecasting, after it was accused of reviving ‘Project Fear’.
The revelations dramatically contrast with Mrs Leadsom’s public statements, with her tweeting that Mrs May’s proposals were “good for the UK” the day after the summit.
She also wrote in the Sunday Express: “This is an offer the EU must not refuse and which the country must get behind.”
Three days after the summit she said in an interview: “Theresa is absolutely sticking to delivering the will of the people.”
Yet the leaked minutes reveal she privately feels quite differently: “The Leader of the House of Commons said that she hated the proposal and regarded it as a breaching the government’s red lines and not being true to the 17.4 million people who had voted for Brexit.
“Those people had known what they were voting for and the government could not just congratulate itself on knowing better than them.
“In her view, the majority of both ministers and civil servants had Remainer tendencies and what came with that was an arrogance that they knew better.”
She also claimed it “did not look like a government trying to get the best deal it could” and argued that “the government was on the slippery slope” as the EU would simply demand more concessions.
And on the Treasury and Philip Hammond, the minutes were scathing: “The Leader of the House said that economic forecasts were only ever as good as the factors that were used in them and she would wager a large sum that the chancellor’s numbers were wrong.”