Tory baroness Patience Wheatcroft has said her party should turn against Brexit supporters “because they’re wrong”, “very disgruntled with life in general”, and “very uncomfortable with the situation in this country and in their own skins”.
The 67-year-old peer, appointed to the House of Lords by former prime minister David Cameron in 2010, told LBC presenter Nick Ferrari that the reason the Tories did so badly in the EU Parliament elections — failing to secure even 10 per cent of the vote — was not because of their failure to deliver Brexit, but “because a lot of Conservatives are pro-Europe, and the party that they’ve previously voted for has moved in a direction that they find very strange and uncomfortable.”
“I struggle to see how [the Conservative Party] can uphold the result of the referendum, because, of course, the referendum was so vague,” she added — an assertion somewhat at odds with the unambiguous nature of the question put the British public in 2016: ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’
Asked by Ferrari what she believed drove so many people to back Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, which comfortably topped the EU elections polls just weeks after it was founded, Wheatcroft adopted a haughty tone: “There are, as there always has been, a considerable number of people in the country who feel very disgruntled with life in general,” she suggested.
“But they’re Tories, aren’t they? Not all, but a lot of Brexit voters were Conservative voters,” asked Ferrari.
“Oh yes, absolutely,” Wheatcroft conceded.
“Why, Baroness, would you want to bolt the door in their face?”
“Because they’re wrong,” she answered dismissively.
The baroness also insisted, in spite of the vote to Leave the European Union in 2016, that the United Kingdom is “a Remain country” — basing this on the morbid belief of some Remainers that enough older voters, who are believed to have backed Brexit in 2016, have now died, and enough Remain-leaning teenagers come of age, that a referendum re-run could now be won.
Ferrari suggested that the EU election results map indicates that “geographically, you can get from one end of England to the other all through Brexit country”, prompting the most contentious part of their exchange.
“[Y]ou could plot your route, Nick — and good luck with it, I don’t think it would be a terribly pleasant route,” she sneered, “but people who are opposed to the EU are not just opposed to the fact they’re part of a greater whole — Europe — they’re very uncomfortable with the situation in this country and in their own skins”.