Britain could “liberate Europe” for a second time in a century by voting for Brexit on June 23, triggering a “patriotic spring” across the continent and an outpouring of populist discontent against Brussels, Geert Wilders, the right-wing Dutch populist, has claimed.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Wilders – a fiercely nationalist, anti-Islamic politician whose Party for Freedom is currently topping the polls in the Netherlands – said that the populist “genie was now out of the bottle”, and could never be put back in.

“Like in the 1940's, once again Britain could help liberate Europe from another totalitarian monster, this time called ‘Brussels’. Again, we could be saved by the British,” he said in his heavily fortified office in The Hague where an oil painting Winston Churchill and a Telegraph front page of Margaret Thatcher hang on the walls.

"If people see that a country can leave, and the lights do not go out, there is not a war, and a country does not go bankrupt, but even flourishes. If Britain proves that this theory can become a reality, it would have an enormous effect.”