Multimillionaire Michael Caine: better to be poor outside EU than rich in it

Multimillionaire Hollywood actor Sir Michael Caine has weighed into the Brexit debate, saying he would rather be poor and outside the EU than rich and in it.

The star, who has an estimated fortune of £57m, also repeated the long-since-dismissed claim by Brexiteers that getting a deal with the EU would be fine because of the “German car companies”.

Caine told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that he did not listen to commentators who said achieving a successful Brexit deal would be difficult.

He said: “I don’t listen to all these pundits. I’m a Brexiteer myself. Certainly.

“And people say ‘oh, you’ll be poor, you’ll be this, you’ll be that’. And I say ‘I’d rather be a poor master of my fate than having someone I don’t know making me rich by running it’.”

Caine said he had seen this week that German car companies would ensure a good trade deal, without specifying exactly what development he had seen which had passed everybody else by.

“I’ve finally seen this week a little something of what I’ve said all along,” he said.

“They’ve said ‘imports, we’re gonna impose these taxes from Britain’ and you go ‘wait a minute, has anybody told the boss of Volkswagen or Mercedes about this?’.

“And the German car companies have started to grumble about this tax.”

Caine is a former Labour voter who abandoned the party for the Conservatives in 2009, saying: ‘I’ll probably vote Conservative. I mean, we’re in a terrible state whichever way you look at it, socially, financially and politically, so just give the other guy a chance.

‘I don’t know what [David] Cameron’s going to do, but in the end you vote out of desperation. You just have to have someone new and see what happens.’

His most recent film was King of Thieves, where he starred alongside fellow millionaire Brexiteer Ray Winstone.

Winstone told the Times last year that he backed Brexit because he got “the hump being told that I can’t have a kidney with my pork chop”.