A wealthy Conservative donor has threatened to pull the plug on funding the party if Theresa May fails to deliver Brexit.
City financier Jeremy Hosking, who pumped £1.5million into the Leave campaign and has donated more than £375,000 to the Tories since 2015, said he has carried out private polling which showed overwhelming support for setting up a new party aimed at delivering promises made during the 2016 referendum campaign.
In a major intervention in the Brexit debate, Hosking claimed Leave voters were ‘being heated up like laboratory frogs’ – partly due to Theresa May’s Chequers plan.
Jeremy Hosking said he has carried out polling which shows support for a party that could deliver a Brexit deal which voters were promised in 2016
Hosking has donated more than £300,000 to the Conservative party since 2015
Hosking said his pressure group Brexit Express was behind a survey which prompted fierce public reaction earlier this month. The survey was accused of asking ‘leading questions’ on whether Tory MPs should be deselected for not following the ‘will of the people’.
He told the Telegraph: ‘Brexit Express has had enough. We must find some way of hopping out of the bubbling water. This is why we have been sponsoring opinion polls in both Tory and Labour constituencies.
‘This polling shows there is clear support for a Brexit party that will deliver what the electorate thought it would be getting.
‘The centre-Left talk but never quite act on setting up a new pro-Europe electoral alternative, bizarrely convinced that repeating an action will produce a different result. Einstein’s definition of madness.’
Hosking’s polling found that across 13 constituencies, 53 per cent of respondents would consider voting for a new party with the sole objective of getting Labour and the Tories to ‘conclude Brexit as quickly and as fully as possible’.
He added: ‘The latest manifestation is Chequers, a “Big Business” Brexit tying us up in EU knots. The obvious question for Eurosceptics to ask is whether the current fiasco is accidental or premeditated?
Hosking said that Theresa May’s Chequers deal has left Leave voters were ‘being heated up like laboratory frogs’
‘Normally the odds favour cock-up over conspiracy … The more plausible thesis by a distance is a deliberate attempt by the British Establishment to render a real exit from the EU impossible.’
The EU’s shock rejection of Theresa May’s Chequers plan threw Downing Street into a tailspin earlier this week, and two senior No 10 advisers have even advocating for calling another snap General Election.
The powerful aides have argued in the wake of the Salzburg humiliation that the only way to ‘make the Commons arithmetic work’ could be to ditch Chequers, and please the Brexit wing of the Tory Party by swinging behind the ‘Canada model’: leaving the Single Market and Customs Union completely, before striking a free-trade deal with Brussels.
With her party’s most militant wing now behind her, Mrs May could then go to the country in November and win a majority sufficient to push through the deal – over the objections of pro-Remain MPs – when it was put to the Commons vote.