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Millionaire Brexiteer Arron Banks has vowed to hijack the Tory leadership contest with right-wingers.

Banks, who bankrolled the Leave.EU campaign, is encouraging his supporters to join the Conservative Party to swing the next leadership election for a Eurosceptic.

Under the current system, Tory MPs hold a series of votes until there are only two candidates left, with grassroots members picking the winner.

But there have been calls to give individual members more of a say - partly to give Boris Johnson, who is popular with Tory members, more of a chance of being in the final two.

In an email Banks writes: "We want people to join the Conservative Party, attend local meetings, and then push for fundamental change within the party."

Leave.Eu assumes that the Tories will be looking for a new leader in the next three to six months.

And that Labour will shortly split.

He writes: "There is a once in a generation chance to unite the right that could then decisively win against a split opposition, in the same way that Mrs Thatcher took on the SDP, Labour and the Liberals to win three decisive victories."

The email makes it clear that Leave.EU would get behind Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg if they were in the running showing them as the natural heirs to Margaret Thatcher and describing them as a "proper Tory leader".

It comes as former Tory leader William Hague warns the party that changing the Tory leadership rules in favour of Boris Johnson would risk “swamping” the party with entryists.

Writing for the Daily Telegraph, the former party leader said the grassroots should not be given too much say in a leadership vote, which could risk a Jeremy Corbyn-style split.

Currently only two leadership candidates go to a final vote, a rule set under Lord Hague’s leadership, but activists want any MP with the support of 20 colleagues to go through.

Lord Hague, who headed the party from 1997-2001, is the latest senior Tory to warn that hard Brexit campaigners are trying to flood the party to install Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg as leader.

(Image: PA)

Lord Hague, who was Conservative Party leader from 1997-2001, argued that affording grassroots Tories a greater say could lead to “entryism” and see the party “swamped by new recruits” - the very thing that happened in the Labour Party in 2015.

He said: “Having not thought to include the three-month membership requirement in their own new rules and having all candidates put to the whole party, Labour’s former leaders inadvertently produced the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, complete with extremism, anti-Semitism, divisiveness and the impossibility of removing him.”

The former Tory leader added: “Such a change would be seen as helping Boris Johnson, who is currently thought to be more popular with the party members than with parliamentarians.”