Eurocrat Verhofstadt Calls Johnson and Brexiteers ‘Traitors’

Progressive-liberal MEP Guy Verhofstadt has accused Prime Minister Boris Johnson and fellow Tory Brexiteers of being the “real traitors”.

The European Parliament’s Brexit negotiator made the comments after Conservative Eurosceptics and the DUP rejected the EU’s counter-offer to Prime Minister Johnson’s Brexit proposal.

Mr Vehofstadt said on Wednesday: “I think that the proposal that Boris Johnson exactly one week ago has put forward was not serious at all.”

The former prime minister of Belgium then claimed Mr Johnson was playing a “blame game”.

“The only one who is not being blamed is Mr Johnson himself apparently,” Mr Verhofstadt said during a session of European Parliament in Brussels. “All those who are not playing his game are traitors, or collaborators, or surrenderers.

“Well, in my opinion, dear colleagues, the real traitor is he or she who would risk bringing disaster upon his country, its economy, its citizens by pushing Britain out of the European Union. That is, in my opinion, a traitor.”

Brexit Party leader and MEP Nigel Farage commented in response to the outburst: “This man is more unhinged than ever.”

While his colleague Martin Daubney responded to the liberal MEP, saying: “Mr Verhofstadt, you do not believe in democracy unless it suits you and except for when you win. When you lose, you don’t like it.”

Mr Verhofstadt is a committed EU federalist known for his bombastic, and at times inflammatory, language. In February, the EP Brexit coordinator suggested Leavers could end up on the guillotine, like the leaders of the French revolution.

“I think Gove is Brissot, Boris Johnson is Danton, and Rees-Mogg is compared to Robespierre. But we should not forget that the efforts of these men were not appreciated by the Common Man they claimed to represent because they all ended up on the guillotine,” he had said.

The senior liberal politician recently called for the European Union to become an empire. Speaking at a Liberal Democrat rally in the UK before May’s European Parliament elections, he said: “The world of tomorrow is a world of empires, in which we Europeans, and you British, can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together, in a European framework, and in European union.”