EU elections branded 'farcical' by senior Tory and Labour MPs

Former Minister and staunch Brexiteer Nigel Adams branded the election, which is expected to have cost the UK well over £100m, a symbol of his own party’s failure to deliver Brexit.

And he warned that if Britain did not leave the EU on October 31, the future of the Tory party would be under threat.

The Selby and Ainsty MP told The Yorkshire Post: “It was farcical that we had to have the elections in the first place.

“These are elections that we shouldn’t have been having.

“But that’s what happens when you’ve failed to get out of the EU, when you have promised to do so for a particular deadline and we could have been out had we played our cards differently...

“MEPs get paid quite a lot of money, their offices and their staffing and all of that sort of stuff has got to be paid for and it

could only be for a matter of months.”

He added: “I think we are in a lot of trouble if we don’t leave on October 31.”

Over the next five months, MEPs will rake in over £30,000 in salary and are also entitled to claim just under £300 per day in expenses.

But with the European Parliamentary term not set to kick in until July and the summer recess stretching across August, MEPs will only be officially working in Brussels and Strasbourg for three months.

Labour MP for Rother Valley Kevin Barron, who has backed Theresa May’s Brexit deal, said: “We have spent over a £100m on an election that has only muddied the waters further to elect MEPs who are likely to be in position for less than six months.

“As we committed to at the 2017 election, we must get on with delivering the referendum result through a deal with the EU.”

However, newly elected Brexit Party MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, John Longworth, suggested that the costs associated with holding the EU elections were worth it to send a message to the Government.

“There is always a cost to democracy. It was very costly to have a referendum that hasn’t actually been delivered,” he said.

“I would have preferred us to have already been out properly.

“But if we had gone ahead with the Prime Minister’s treaty, we would not have been out at all.

“In fact we would have been locked into an international treaty forever, which would have been detrimental to the UK and would not have been Brexit.”

On his salary, he added: “I would drop it at a moment’s notice if we left the European Union.”