Mr Blair is a vocal Europhile and often encouraged greater integration within the EU throughout his decade in Downing Street. While no longer the Prime Minister, Mr Blair has been advocating in favour of a second referendum on Brexit if Parliament cannot agree on how the UK leaves the EU. He has also suggested that a no deal Brexit ‘is a threat to the UK’ and has been critical of Britain leaving the EU.

In his 2019 book, ‘A Short History of Brexit: From Backstop to Brentry’, Kevin O’Rourke pointed out how Mr Blair’s enthusiasm for expansion could have helped to appease Euroscepticism.

He wrote: “The UK had always favoured ‘widening’ the EU over ‘deepening’ it: it was more in favour of admitting new members than of deepening integration.

“And if widening made deepening more difficult, so much the better!”

It was thought expansion would help prevent the “ever-closer union” and potentially scupper the plans for the foreseeable future.

One of the traditional Eurosceptics, Margaret Thatcher also wanted to ensure free trade and create effective competition when she was in office but was strongly against increasing any central power.

Mr O’Rourke explained: “Under her the British government became an enthusiastic supporter of the greatest deepening of Europe integration experienced since the 1950s.”

The Single Market was established during her premiership and she was in favour of majority voting because it “helped to create a competitive and freer market across Europe” – known as ‘Thatcherism on a European scale’, which was backed by almost everyone in the cabinet.

When the European Union began to deepen its connection, Mrs Thatcher began to move towards Euroscepticism, despite campaigning to stay in the EU during the 1975 referendum.

Yet, many years later when New Labour was in power, as Mr O’Rourke said: “Tony Blair was a leading advocate of rapid enlargement to the east, and in 2004 ten new member states joined the EU.”

These new additions were made up of eight former Soviet states – Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia – as well as Cyprus and Malta.

Mr O’Rourke added: “There was, of course, a compelling moral and strategic argument in favour of admitting to the EU countries who had suffered for so long under Soviet oppression who desperately wanted to belong to the West, and who feared renewed domination by Russia.”

Only three years later, Bulgaria and Romania joined too, followed by Croatia in 2013, pushing the total number of EU states up to 28.

Yet, as Mr O’Rourke clarified this enlargement “was important in helping Brexit to come about in the first place”.

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As Mary Deievsky said in The Independent in May this year: “Would the Leave [campaign] have won without the Blair government’s misjudgement on how many ‘new’ Europeans would take advantage of free movement to the UK after 2004?”

A piece written by Asa Bennett in The Telegraph in February 2017 also commented on the decisions made by Mr Blair.

Mr Bennett said: “Mr Blair called EU enlargement one of the ‘greatest achievements of British diplomacy of the last decades’. But his failure to impose controls on migrants – as most EU states did – meant that migration from Eastern European ballooned.”

Mr Blair’s motives for even wanting the enlargement were also questioned recently.

In his farewell interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel earlier this month, the outgoing European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said Tony Blair “wanted nothing to do with the EU”, and that attitude actually contributed towards Brexit.

Mr Juncker said: “When it came to the political union, to moving closer together, [the British] wanted nothing to do with the EU.

“That was even the case with my friend Tony Blair. If you stick to that narrative for over 40 years, it should not come as a surprise when people remember it during the referendum.

“I have been in evolved in European politics since December 1982 and have seen time and again that the British have operated on the premise: We are only in the EU for economic reasons.”

Mr Blair also reportedly requested to meet the incoming European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen earlier this month.

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