Nigel Farage admitted “Brexit has failed” during a fiery clash on the BBC’s Newsnight.
The former UKIP leader made the surprise comment as he was presented with the mounting evidence that quitting the European Union has damaged the British economy.
He said the Conservatives had failed to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the 2016 referendum result.
Newsnight presenter Victoria Derbyshire said: “A poll from last month showed that 53% of people say it was wrong to Brexit - around one in five Leave voters regret it.
″The OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility] forecast a 4% hit to the economy over the medium-to-long-term - that’s £40bn in tax revenues.
“The UK economy is the only G7 economy not back to its pre-pandemic size. Business investment has lagged behind comparable economies.
“Economically, the UK would have been better off staying in, wouldn’t it?”
Farage said he “doesn’t think that for a minute”, but insisted the Tories had been worse than the European Commission at running the economy.
He said: “What I do think is that we haven’t actually benefited economically from Brexit.
″What Brexit’s proved, I’m afraid is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were.
“We’ve mismanaged this totally, and if you look at simple things such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country.
″Arguably, now we’re back in control, we’re regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members. Brexit has failed.”
Asked if that meant he could make yet another political comeback, Farage said it was “not top of my bucket list”, but refused to rule it out.
He said: “We’ve not delivered on borders, we’ve not delivered on Brexit - the Tories has left us down very, very badly.”
Farage previously said he would leave the country if Brexit turned out to be a “disaster”.
But speaking in 2017, he insisted that would never happen anyway as Brexit “isn’t going to be a disaster”.