David Davis' former aide sparks calls for anti-Brexit party

Two Conservative cabinet ministers have discussed creating a new centrist party, designed to oppose Brexit, a former Tory aide has claimed.

James Chapman worked as former chancellor George Osborne's director of communications as he campaigned to keep Britain in the EU, and was later chief of staff to Brexit Secretary David Davis for a year after the referendum.

"Two people in the cabinet now, and a number of people who have been in Conservative cabinets before now, better cabinets I might say than the current one, and a number of shadow cabinet ministers have also been in touch," he told BBC radio.

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Chapman, who is also the Daily Mail's former political editor, quit the government before June's general election, and has been extremely active on Twitter in recent weeks.

"Past time for sensible MPs in all parties to admit Brexit is a catastrophe, come together In new party if need be, and reverse it #euref19", he said on Tuesday, before publishing another tweet tagging notable pro-EU MPs from both the Labour and Conservative parties. "I mean you", it read.

The prospect of a new party is nothing new. Just last month, Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker bemoaned the hard-left and hard-right policies of the two major parties, and suggested there could be room for a centrist alternative.

Many Twitter users responded positively to Lineker's tweet, and Chapman's comments have been met with similar enthusiasm.

One user even went to the trouble of creating a new Twitter account called @DemocratChapman, designed - according to their bio - "for those heeding @jameschapman's call for a new UK Democratic Party (Unofficial as yet)".

Meanwhile Conservative MP and fervent pro-leave campaigner Jacob Ress-Mogg, who was also speaking on BBC radio when Chapman floated the idea, expressed his disapproval of the idea.

Of course, in calling for the creation a third, centrist, anti-Brexit party, Chapman appears to have forgotten, like many, that the Lib Dems exist.

During his series of anti-Brexit tweets, Chapman also criticised Foreign Secretary and Leave campaign mastermind Boris Johnson.

The tweet included the hashtag "#wheresmy350maweekboris", a reference to Johnson's frequently repeated claim that the UK sends £350m per week to the EU, and that that money would be redirected to the NHS if the UK voted for Brexit.

Some people agreed with the tweet:

While others said Chapman was himself partially to blame for Britain's exit from the EU: