Arch-Remainer Tony Blair has been humiliated after a poll by his Institute for Global Change asking if Britain should stay in the EU found an overwhelming majority in favour of ‘Hard Brexit’.

As de facto leader of the so-called ‘Remain Resistance’ backed by billionaire open borders campaigner George Soros, the former prime minister asked the public to “please vote” on whether the Government should “leave [the European Union] at whatever cost” or “stay and re-think” in a Facebook poll.

Despite offering a very leading question, Blair suffered a heavy defeat, with 66 per cent of respondents backing a so-called ‘Hard Brexit’ after some 174,600 votes.

After 174,000 votes the results of Tony Blair's decidedly loaded Brexit poll asking voters if they want Britain to "leave at whatever cost" or "stay and re-think" are in – and I suspect he did not the result he was looking for. How long before @InstituteGC quietly deletes it…? pic.twitter.com/mJtBySAKfB — Jack Montgomery ن (@JackBMontgomery) March 2, 2018

The margin of defeat was as wide as 70 per cent to 30 per cent less than 24 hours before the poll closed, when staff at the Tony Blair Institute realised something had gone wrong and managed to claw back a few percentage points.

The Iraq War architect’s humiliation was compounded by a botched attempt at damage control by his staff, who claimed their Facebook poll had been “hijacked” by “Naughty Nigel [Farage]” — but that a Twitter poll they had run in parallel found “a genuine 81 per cent of people would rather stay in the EU and think again”.

The Institute had cropped the number of people who participated in this poll out of the accompanying image which they shared — but social media users soon found the original tweet, which showed a mere 1,830 people had participated.

Whoops. Looks like Tony Blair got the wrong answer in his ‘poll of mass destruction’. https://t.co/ZMEpX3Jsx6 — Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) March 2, 2018

Why a poll in which only a handful of Tony Blair Institute followers voted should be more valid than a much larger one which Brexit supporters were actually aware of was not explained, but this attempted sleight of hand earned the derision of hundreds of social media users on both Facebook and Twitter.

“You mean like the referendum was hijacked?” asked one user. “You lot really are sore losers. No, forget the sore bit. Just losers.”

Another said: “I think you’ll find those genuine 81 per cent are just your own tiny little echo chamber. If you don’t open a poll up to both sides of the argument you can’t possibly claim to have an honest result. We had one of those in June 2016. More than half the people who took part voted to Leave.”

“Going by the thread after this tweet, you’ve pretty much become the laughing stock of Twitter. Congratulations,” added another.

Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery