Second Brexit referendum needed because Leave voters are dying off, Nick Clegg suggests

Brexit should be put to a second referendum because people who voted Leave are dying off, the former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg has suggested.

Mr Clegg, who was deputy prime minister in the coalition government, said the “high point” of support for Brexit had passed because “the oldest voters voted for Brexit in the largest numbers” while the young voted to remain in the EU.

He believes that MPs will reject whatever Brexit deal the government negotiates, and at that point Britain should have the chance to vote on a reformed EU with the UK in an “outer orbit” of it.

Mr Clegg, who lost his seat in June’s general election, argued that voters were “promised a utopia” in the referendum campaign and would change their minds in droves once they saw the reality.

He told the BBC’s Andrew Marr: “The last vote was…a sort of photo finish, there was only 650,000 votes in it. And how can I put this politely? Actually I suspect that the high point of the Brexit vote has already passed. Crucially, young people who have to live with the consequences of that referendum vote and these botched negotiations overwhelmingly want something different.”

Asked whether he was saying that Brexit voters are “dying off”, he said: “Well, I’m saying if you look at the demography, the oldest voters voted for Brexit in the largest numbers, the youngest voters did the opposite.”

Mr Clegg, who has written a book on how Brexit could be stopped, said that if the Government presented a “threadbare” deal to Parliament in a year’s time MPs will have “a duty” to prevent it.

He said: “Given that people will have been sold Brexit on a totally false prospectus, surely it is the right of the people, via their MPs, to take back control of this process, end this tedious psychodrama of the Conservative Party, and indeed the constipated ambivalence of the Labour Party, and say, ‘hang on a minute, this is not what you told us would happen, therefore we want our MPs to say stop’.”

He said he did not believe the UK could “return to the status quo of the June 22, 2016” but “I do think we can re-dock ourselves in an outer orbit of membership within a reformed European Union.”

He claimed to have spoken to “many leaders across the EU” who would be happy to “stop the clock” on the legal process of Brexit before it becomes official in March 2019 and welcome Britain back into the fold.