Guy Verhofstadt has warned Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg that they could suffer a similar fate to that meted out to the leaders of the French Revolution, who were executed on the guillotine.

The incendiary claim came as billionaire investor George Soros predicted on Tuesday that Eurosceptic parties could destroy the EU after making gains in May’s European Parliament elections.

Mr Soros warned that the European Union was “sleepwalking towards oblivion” and could collapse as quickly as the Soviet Union did in 1991, unless it woke the “sleeping pro-European majority” before the elections.

Mr Verhofstadt attacked Conservatives who would reject attempts at forming a cross-party consensus with Labour to break the Brexit impasse in the House of Commons.

“It’s completely irresponsible of the hardliners to reject such cross party cooperation because a no deal scenario is a disaster for everybody and especially for the UK,” the European Parliament’s Brexit Coordinator said in Strasbourg.

“I know that in the Tory party the hard Brexiteers are compared to the leaders of the French Revolution. I think [Michael] Gove is Brissot, Boris Johnson Danton, Jacob Rees-Mogg Robespierre.

He added, “But we should not forget that the efforts of these men were not appreciated by the common men they claimed to represent because they all ended up at the guillotine.”