Johnson says rerun of Brexit vote would cause turmoil, feuding

A rerun of the Brexit referendum would cause another year of feuding and turmoil, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Wednesday as he sought to describe his vision of a "liberal" departure from the European Union.

In a speech as part of a Cabinet roadshow intended to shed some light on the post-Brexit relationship with the EU, Johnson said the government needed to “reach out to those who still have anxieties”.

"In some cases, alas, I detect a hardening of the mood, a deepening of the anger. I fear that some people are becoming ever more determined to stop Brexit, to reverse the referendum vote...and to frustrate the will of the people," he said.

"I believe that would be a disastrous mistake that would lead to permanent and ineradicable feelings of betrayal. We cannot and will not let it happen."

He maintained his hardline approach on the single market and customs union, saying that leaving both frameworks would allow Britain to strike its own free trade deals.

“It is only by taking back control of our laws that UK firms and entrepreneurs will have the freedom to innovate, without the risk of having to comply with some directive devised by Brussels, at the urgings of some lobby group, with the aim of holding back a UK competitor,” he told a London audience.

In a bizarre passage, Johnson tried to highlight the benefits of leaving the EU by arguing that Britons would still be able to retire to Spain and have the freedom to travel the world.

“We will continue ever more intensively to go on cheapo flights to stag parties in ancient cities, meet interesting people, fall in love, struggle amiably to learn the European languages whose decline has been a paradoxical feature of EU membership,” he said.

“We have a bigger diaspora than any other rich nation – six million points of light scattered across an intermittently darkening globe.”

“There are more British people living in Australia than in the whole of the EU, and more in the US and Canada. As I have just discovered we have more than a million who go to Thailand every year, where according to our superb consular services they get up to the most eye-popping things.”