Obama expected to appeal against Brexit

This week, Barack Obama is expected to call for the UK to remain inside the European Union both in a newspaper article as well as in remarks at a Downing Street press conference on Friday afternoon. It is anticipated that he will rely on his status as Britain’s strongest ally to advise that the country’s prosperity and influence will suffer without the EU.

The remain campaign are counting on the US president’s appeal to tip the balance decisively in the upcoming referendum.

“We are killing them with the arguments and we are killing them in the campaign,” said one Downing Street official. “It is increasingly clear that leave as a campaign is under-resourced, and is simply incapable of forming an argument for what Brexit looks like. We have Obama on our side and who have they come up with – Marine Le Pen”.

The four-day long Obama endorsement falls right after the leave campaign’s most difficult week, which included the Treasury intervention on the costs of Brexit, additional third-party endorsements of remain by prestigious names and a controversial appearance by Vote Leave campaign director Dominic Cummings at the Treasury select committee.

Obama’s intervention is expected to have a double function; one is to point out the positive effects Britain’s influence has had in Europe, and the second is to clarify the fanciful prospect of the UK to strike independent trade deals with the US if it is outside the European Union.

Former EU trade commissioner Lord Mandelson agreed that Obama’s intervention would hurt the leave campaign because leave “offering a ridiculous fantasy free-trade area stretching from Albania to Bosnia. The core of this campaign is about prosperity and economics, and the more it is about these issues the more leave loses.”