'Cosying up to the EU is just an act of despair...

John Longworth was enjoying a comfortable life at the heart of the UK establishment, a successful entrepreneur happily leading the British Chambers of Commerce. Yet he decided to blow it all up to help Britain escape the European Union...

- David Williamson

HE HAD already navigated an impressive career immersed in Britain's supermarket revolution, before taking the reins of the British Chambers of Commerce. But as the 2016 Brexit referendum neared he could keep silent no longer - declaring the EU "incapable of meaningful reform.

Speaking from the heart resulted in John Longworth's suspension as director-general of the powerful business group. But this freed him to campaign at full pelt for Brexit - and then to stand and win a seat in the European Parliament as a member of Nigel Farage's Brexit Party.

Nearly a decade on from the vote to leave the EU, he once again fears for the future of Britain.

He is dismayed by Sir Keir Starmer's pursuit of a closer relationship with Brussels and by Chancellor Rachel Reeves's economic decisions.

"The idea that we are a wealthy country is complete nonsense," he warns. "In terms of people's prosperity we are in dire straits." He has a simple diagnosis of why Brexit has yet to deliver longed-for growth: "We won a revolution but left the establishment in charge who had done everything possible to frustrate it." In his supermarket days he travelled the world even venturing into the Amazon region in search of soya beans - and witnessing the surging growth of emerging economies convinced him Britain was missing out on true prosperity.

He remembers saying in the 1990s: "We need to start loading planes up to take people out to Asia to see what real growth looks like because they have no idea." Britain's "relative decline", he decided, was a "serious problem". The nation needed a different order of growth in order to maintain the NHS.

Years of visiting businesses across the country convinced him British enterprises could rise to the challenge of life outside the EU.

"They were quite capable of doing anything if they were set free," he says. "What I knew was that the legislative burden of the European Union was just going to grow and grow."