He said that Mrs May had missed the opportunity to build a coalition of support for her compromise and that negotiations could not be allowed to drag on beyond the end of the year.

The director of Aquind Limited, which wants to build an electricity interconnector between the UK and France, said energy prices would jump after a no-deal Brexit. “No deal is the worst scenario, [a] new election is better.”

Mr Temerko said that the country must “look to the future”. He added that the confidence-and-supply deal with the Democratic Unionist Party was in any case starting to unravel. Some grassroots Tories were “aggressively pro-Brexit” and it would be hard for a centrist figure to win the leadership, but he thought that Mrs May must nevertheless be replaced in December if she could not win her Brexit vote, he said.