Jeremy Corbyn will be in power for up to twenty years if Theresa May goes ahead with a chaotic no-deal Brexit, former Cabinet minister Sir Oliver Letwin has warned.
The Tory grandee said that the damage caused to his party from crashing out of the EU without a Brussels deal would be even worse than that caused by ‘Black Wednesday’, when John Major jacked up interest rates in 1992.
Sir Oliver, who was a driving force behind the Prime Minister’s move this week to allow a delay to Brexit to late June, told BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Week in Westminster’ that he hoped the risk of no-deal had been averted.
But he said that his main motive for changing the PM’s timetable was that Brexit chaos would lead to a Corbyn government, elected with ‘a very big majority’ as the voters punished the Tories for wrecking the economy.
Sir Oliver said that if a no-deal course was followed, “it would not be somebody else, the EU, the Almighty, the Labour Party that would be blamed”.
“It would be the governing party. And I think under those circumstances we would have had to expect a decade or two in the wilderness,” he said.
“Think back to Black Wednesday, which is a similar sort of event where we didn’t need to do what we did and we did it because we made a series of errors…if you ask what happened over the next 20 years, we had a succession of quite good Labour governments.”
But on the Radio 4 programme to be broadcast on Saturday, the Tory veteran said that the danger of a long-term Corbyn-style government would be an altogether different prospect.
“The truth is if the risks had materialised, it wouldn’t have been 13 years of Blair-Brown governments…it would have been a Corbyn government,” he said.
“This is not just a question of what would happen immediately to our country, nor just a question of what would happen to the Conservative party but what would happen to the country…namely that it would be governed by Corbyn for a long time, and probably with a very big majority.
“If you want to create circumstances of Venezuela that’s what you would have done. This is the reason why I was willing to go out on a limb with many others and work on a cross-party basis to prevent all that happening.”
Letwin, who worked with Labour’s Yvette Cooper and several ministers to persuade May to change tack, said that the delay was already having an impact on the bulk of European Research Group of backbench Tory Brexiteers.
“I think for the great majority of ERG colleagues who are more pragmatic…if Geoffrey Cox comes back with something with sufficient legal effect to bring the DUP on board, I think we will see as sort of switch being turned and a cascade of my ERG colleagues being able to vote for the deal.”
He added that if the deal was not approved there would be a three month delay and there are ‘very large numbers of us across the parties’ who would strike a compromise deal including a customs union or form of ‘Norway-plus’ style exit.
Letwin rejected claims that the Tory party would split if a softer Brexit was hammered out by May with Labour support.
“Is the Conservative party going to fracture into two vast armies that clash? Of course it isn’t. Most of my colleagues are very firmly attached to being Conservatives. People are much more interested in capturing the castle, than leaving it.”
He added that he had “mobilised” colleagues after he’d become convinced a fortnight ago that “she was prepared when the chips were down to allow a no-deal exit”. “I thought that was a very bad idea.”
Also appearing on ‘Week In Westminster’, Labour MP Gareth Snell warned that his party’s new shift to a second Brexit referendum would never get through Parliament.
“I know there are sufficient Labour MPs who will oppose it and there are not enough Tory MPs to support it to make it go through. There is no majority in the House of Commons for this, whatever the final numbers are, of that I am confident.”