Top woman boss urges Britain to quit EU

A champion of women in the boardroom has called for Britain to leave the European Union.

Helena Morrissey, 47, the CEO of Newton Investment Management, branded it “a passé political structure” and said its top-down approach to business and politics was too prescriptive.

“The current EU for me is a model for the past. It is the old world,” she wrote in The Sunday Telegraph. “I am certainly not a backward-looking ‘little Englander’. On the contrary, I have great confidence that Britain and the British people could thrive outside the EU.”

Citing the EU’s heavy-handed attempts for mandatory gender quotas in the boardroom, she called for Britain to abandon the EU. She said: “I am not afraid that all will be lost. Indeed, I am confident we have much more to gain from the outward-looking, entrepreneurial spirit that has long defined us, than if we stay bickering, fighting and losing within a passé political structure that is wholly unnatural to us.”

Mrs Morrissey, who was last year awarded a CBE, founded the 30 Per Cent Club, a group of chairmen committed to 30 per cent female membership in boardrooms by 2015.