‘Brexit’ inventor who first flagged issue four years ago backs Britain to vote for Remain

THE City analyst who helped to coin the term Brexit and first warned investors about the threat of a Leave vote backed Britain to stay in the EU today.

Former Nomura senior policy analyst Alastair Newton, a veteran British diplomat and ex-adviser to Tony Blair, startled markets in August 2012 when he warned the Japanese bank’s clients that it was “increasingly likely” the UK would exit the European Union.

“We see difficulty securing an ‘In’ vote no matter how the question is framed,” he said at the time.

Now, however, Newton believes Britain will remain in the union.

“I stand by my 2012 call that this is going to be close but that ultimately — as Peter Mandelson put it — the eurosceptic but pragmatic British will vote to remain in the EU,” he told the Standard.

Nomura helped to draw the City’s attention to the issue with the widely-read analyst note, penned by Newton, saying that it would be difficult to get a Remain vote without “significant concessions” from the EU. It called this new phenomenon Brixit, a term which slowly evolved into Brexit.

Newton said the word was derived from Grexit, which was topical at the time as Greece’s debt crisis threatened to force it out of Europe. The expression Brexit was also published in The Economist magazine at the time.

Newton, who spent 20 years in the diplomatic service in Africa, Paris and the US, left his role at Nomura last year after a decade in the City. He has since founded a small business consultancy in Zambia.