The battle for UK membership of the European Union is lost and the question will not be reopened for 20 years, Europhile former deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine has said.
Lord Heseltine, who lost the Tory whip after urging people to vote against Conservatives to stop Brexit, played down the prospect of an immediate campaign to rejoin the EU, and said the focus must now be on ensuring that Boris Johnson’s withdrawal deal works for disadvantaged areas of the UK. [...]
Lord Heseltine said the priority for pro-Europeans must now be to try to shape a future relationship with Europe which minimises the harm from Brexit.
“We have lost, let’s not muck about with the language,” he told the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Brexit is going to happen and we have to live with it.
“There will now be a long period of uncertainty, but we can’t escape from that, so we must do the best we can.”
Brushing off the prospect of an immediate campaign to rejoin, Lord Heseltine said: “I don’t think it’s gone, but it won’t be my generation. It will be 20 years or something before the thing is once again raised as an issue.”
Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, a member of the European parliament’s Brexit Steering Group, said that a trade deal with zero tariffs would depend on whether the Conservative Party was able to “face up to its own contradictions”.
Mr Lamberts said: “They want the deepest possible access to the European single market, yet they want to undercut significantly EU legislation, and you can’t have both.
“So either you want total regulatory freedom and you do whatever you like – and if you want to undercut EU legislation then you do it, but then you lose access. Or you want access and you have basically to remain aligned with EU legislation, that will be the decision that Boris Johnson will need to make.”
He added: “If the United Kingdom wants to retain full access, including for services, that will have the adverse consequence that it has to remain aligned to EU legislation in services as well, and I understand that some in the government would want to deviate from that quite significantly.”
Mr Farage admitted that the influence on the prime minister of his Brexit Party and the European Research Group of backbench Tory Eurosceptics has “disappeared for the time being” as a result of Mr Johnson’s overwhelming victory.
But he vowed to be “not too far away from the action” as the UK’s new relationship with the EU takes shape.
Writing in The Daily Telegraph, the architect of Brexit said: “Questions over the future shape of Brexit and Britain’s place in the world are now entirely in the hands of Johnson.
“With half of his cabinet having voted Remain, and substantial global pressures on him, it will be tempting for him to pursue the easy option of a soft Brexit.
“Whatever happens over the coming months, I will make sure I am not too far away from the action. The fact is that if Brexit does not ‘get done’, as Johnson has promised repeatedly over the last six weeks, pressure will have to be reapplied.”
Full article on The Independent
Nigel Farage article for The Daily Telegraph: Outlawing more Brexit delay is bold, but Boris Johnson must beware the EU's trade talks trap
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