Have the anti-Brexit campaigners found their prophet to lead Britain out of the Brexit wilderness to a  promised land? This evening (4 June) the vainest man on the planet, Bernard-Henri Lévy, comes to Sloane Square in Chelsea to perform in Cadogan Hall a one-man show against Brexit.

Mr Lévy is generally described as a ‘public intellectual’ though publicist extraordinaire might be a better title. Unlike, say a Régis Debray who went and fought in Marxist guerrilla campaigns in South America and had to be rescued from captivity by the French state, or perhaps Noam Chomsky, who has never taken a physical risk,  but is a heavyweight academic of linguistics, Lévy has not written any major book but rather made a series of films mainly about himself.

Tonight he will tell his audience that Europe is finished without Britain. As a classic neo-liberal pro-American rightist, Lévy, 70 this year but never photographed without his white shirt unbuttoned to his belly-button, hopes to get Britain to rethink Brexit by saying British economic liberalism is essential to the European project.

Little matter that many believe that it has been Brussel’s liberal economic orthodoxy with a focus on austerity, cutting wages, slashing social expenditure, and protecting the wealthy that has helped produce modern anti-EU votes, including Brexit.  Mr Lévy’s message is that Manchester liberalism is what Europe needs

However Mr Lévy is certainly responsible for one of the proximate causes of current European distress – namely the tsunami of refugees, economic migrants and Islamist jihadis who have taken advantage of the destruction of the Libyan state since 2011 to pour through the 1900 kilometer long Libyan coastline to arrive in Europe, usually via Italy which has just elected a government pledged to repatriate 500,000 refugees penned in southern Italy as the rest of Europe doesn’t want them.

Lévy has always been attracted to insurrectionist Muslim radicalism. He supported the jihadis in Afghanistan as they mutated into the Taliban. He backed Bosniak Muslims in the Yugoslav wars, and Kurdish Muslims fighting the secular Baathists in Iraq and now Syria.

In 2011 Lévy called up his fellow bling-bling copain Nicolas Sarkozy to urge launch a military campaign to overthrow Gaddafi. Sarkozy called up David Cameron and William Hague, and two British leaders made every mistake in the Iraq playbook as they blundered in behind Sarkozy and Levy to destroy the Libyan state.

The result is an open conduit for every oppressed or poor Arab or African in the Sahara and further south to arrive in Europe. In Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Slovenia the classic centre-right, liberal and social democratic parties have lost much ground to the new anti-immigrant nationalists thanks to Libya losing all control over its frontiers after the 2011 Sarkozy-Cameron intervention which Lévy insists he inspired.

As someone who thinks Britain amputating herself from Europe is an historic blunder I ought to welcome any campaigner who says Brexit is wrong. But with friends like Mr Lévy the pro-European cause needs no local enemies like Jacob Rees Mogg.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former Minister of Europe. His latest book is Brexit, No Exit. Why (in the End) Britain Won’t Leave Europe (IB Tauris)