Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chosen representative in the Brexit negotiations, has launched an astonishing personal attack on Tory leadership favourite Boris Johnson, accusing him of “false promises, pseudo-patriotism, and foreigner bashing”.
Verhofstadt, a former Prime Minister of Belgium, where many key institutions of the European Union are based, sneered that “To those of us watching from the outside, the debate between [Boris Johnson and rival candidate Jeremy Hunt] confirms that they have learned nothing whatsoever from the past two years of negotiations with the EU.”
The Belgian accused the former Foreign Secretary and two-time Mayor of London of spreading “untruths”, and that “Chief among them is the myth that Britain can tear up the withdrawal agreement that [Theresa] May negotiated with the EU, withhold its financial commitments to the bloc, and simultaneously start negotiating free trade deals.”
Prime Minister May committed Britain to paying the EU a so-called divorce settlement of an estimated £39 billion — despite the fact the country has put tens of billions more into the EU budget than it has taken out for decades, and that the EU is seeking to exclude the British from EU projects they helped fund and develop after Brexit.
“To Johnson’s followers, however, he is more prophet than politician,” Verhofstadt asserted.
“Only he can deliver a mythical ‘true Brexit’ that will deliver the prosperity promised during the referendum campaign,” he added sarcastically.
Verhohstadt and his team are of course deeply attached to the ultra-soft and disadvantageous form of Brexit which Theresa May agreed to, having bragged openly that it had “turned [Britain] into a colony”, as was “the plan from the first moment”.
The Belgian went so far as to claim that Mrs May’s key negotiator, unelected bureaucrat and former European federalist and Soviet Union admirer Olly Robbins, had asked him if he could become a Belgian citizen after Brexit.
The May deal’s failure to pass through Parliament on three occasions leaves Verhofstadt and his fellow-travellers in a difficult situation, however, in which they may be forced to go for broke attempting to block Brexit entirely or else end up with a clean, No Deal decoupling in which the EU — which sells far more to Britain than Britain sells to the EU — could suffer a devastating economic blow.
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