George Soros is a champion of democracy, but on Brexit he is backing the wrong side

Why, then, would an investor as shrewd as Mr Soros waste his money? His interest in Britain is natural enough. He arrived here as a teenager, escaping Communist-run Hungary, and became a penniless waiter in Mayfair, living on leftover profiteroles. His break came when he won a place at the London School of Economics, which was then home to two unfashionable free-market thinkers: Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper. He became friends with the latter, and learnt to go against the grain of conventional wisdom. He applied this skill to finance, with sensational effect, in the City and then in Wall Street.

To his immense credit, he wanted to give back at an early stage – hence the politics. He put his own luck down to the democracies he lived in, mindful that their freedoms had to be defended both during and after the war. Margaret Thatcher once slapped down a Hayek book on the table and told her frontbench “this is what we believe”. Soros too wanted to turn argument into action: he took Popper’s book, The Open Society, as the name for his pro-democracy foundation. And put its principles to work, helping those fighting for democracy on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

So yes, Soros has been interfering in politics for decades. But for quite a clear purpose: to help as many people as possible enjoy the liberty he experienced in the West. There’s no point sending aid to Africa if the cash is spent under a corrupt regime. The purest form of philanthropy, he thought, lay in promoting democracy from Afghanistan to Zagreb. Last year he donated $18 billion of his fortune to his Open Society Foundation. It has more cash than almost any other charity on earth. But the problem is that it doesn’t, nowadays, have a very clear mission.

This explains his muddle over Brexit. Soros has been an avid supporter of the EU since its inception, seeing it as the surest way of helping post-Soviet countries. This made perfect sense after the Berlin Wall came down, even more so when the eastern bloc countries joined the EU at the turn of the century.

But as the EU steadily mutated, things changed. Brussels began to act as a would-be continental government, issuing diktats and being unresponsive to the changing popular concerns. Its inability to respond to the twin challenges of the past decade – the financial crash and mass immigration – created a crisis, and the conditions for a populist backlash.

Soros did his bit fighting populists, for which he was denounced as a traitor by opponents in his native Hungary – where prime minister Viktor Orban has relished portraying him as the wealthy outsider set to corrupt society. Anti-semitic attack lines have been shamelessly deployed, as politicians in Budapest mutter about a “Christian duty” to oppose him.

The tone of the attacks against him have shocked much of Europe, and will have left him feeling at war. It’s possible he looked at Brexit and imagined that the same kind of forces may be at play. And here, perhaps, he might have lost sight of the fundamental question.

Which is: in the Brexit debate, which side to back? Karl Popper himself lived long enough to offer some clues. Shortly before his death in 1994, he said it was tragic how the principles that he and Hayek had stood for during the Cold War seemed to be forgotten afterwards. In Brussels, he said, there was a “bureaucracy without a clear responsibility to any democratic control”. In Strasbourg, a parliament “without any competence to control the all-powerful bureaucracy”.

Which was precisely the message of Vote Leave throughout the referendum campaign: that Brexit is about protecting the institutions of democracy – government, parliament, courts – and bringing them closer to the people. No campaign quotes tracts of philosophy, but the slogan “take back control” could have been the leitmotif of any one of the Soros campaigns which worked to such effect during the Cold War. And afterwards, where his support helped Mikheil Saakashvili become president of Georgia and many others to fight against Moscow’s influence.

As Saakashvili once put it, Soros was at his best in a clear battle between democracy and authoritarianism, “but when he starts to play politics, he’s not that good”.

As we are seeing now. “Many people think the elites have stolen their democracy,” Soros wrote a year ago. Quite so, yet he has now ended up bankrolling a campaign to reverse the biggest vote cast in the history of British democracy.

Soros is a great advocate of doing research before spending money, but failed to do enough before donating that £400,000 to Best for Britain. If he is bored and seeks a political fight, he will not be disappointed. But if he is genuinely committed to democracy and bringing politics closer to the people, then he has just backed the wrong side.