President of the European Council Donald Tusk said that he warned former British prime minister David Cameron over his “stupid” EU referendum, calling it “dangerous.”
“I told him bluntly, come on David, get real. I know that all prime ministers are promising to help you, but believe me the truth is that no one has an appetite for revolution in Europe only because of your stupid referendum,” Mr Tusk said, according to a preview of an interview of the bureaucrat by the BBC released on Monday.
“I asked David Cameron, why did you decide on this referendum … it’s so dangerous, so even stupid, you know, and he told me — and I was really amazed and even shocked,” the Polish left-liberal exclaimed.
Fearing the rising popularity of Eurosceptic party UKIP and it taking votes away from the Tories, Cameron’s Conservative Party, which at the time was in a coalition government with the left-wing Liberal Democrats, pledged to hold a referendum if they won the 2015 General Election.
Mr Tusk revealed during his interview for BBC documentary Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil, which is set to be aired on January 28th, that Mr Cameron had only made the promise believing that after the election he would still be in a minority and his Europhile coalition partners would block it.
However, much to Cameron’s apparent surprise, he won a majority, with the Brussels bureaucrat saying beforehand that Cameron “felt really safe, because he thought… that there’s no risk of a referendum, because his coalition partner, the Liberals, would block this idea of a referendum.
“But then, surprisingly, he won [the election] and there was no coalition partner. So paradoxically, David Cameron became the real victim of his own victory.”
Then-Prime Minister Cameron campaigned for Remain, with his Government spending £9.3 million on a pro-EU leaflet which the Electoral Commission later ruled gave the Remain side an unfair advantage, and his Chancellor George Osborne churned out Project Fear stories of dire financial predictions in the event of a vote to leave the EU — which were proven false.
It was also later revealed that threats by then-President Barack Obama that Brexit Britain would be “at the back of the queue” for a bilateral trade deal with the United States were issued at the behest of Cameron.
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