Britain could leave the European Union and enter into a looser economic relationship with it as the eurozone moves towards becoming a federal state, former European Commission president Jacques Delors has suggested, reports The Telegraph.
Mr Delors, who is credited as the architect of the modern EU and the euro, has broken ranks with other European leaders to offer Britain an exit from the Union.
"The British are solely concerned about their economic interests, nothing else. They could be offered a different form of partnership," he told Handelsblatt, a German financial newspaper.
"If the British cannot support the trend towards more integration in Europe, we can nevertheless remain friends, but on a different basis. I could imagine a form such as a European economic area or a free-trade agreement."
The comments will add weight to growing demands from Conservative backbench MPs and Euro-sceptics for David Cameron to renegotiate Britain's relationship with Europe and to bring back powers from the EU to Westminster.
The Prime Minister has said that he supports continued EU membership but wants a "new settlement" which will involve Britain opting-out of justice measures and seeking exemptions to any further centralisation of power in Brussels.
The proposal from Mr Delors suggest that France might be willing to cut Britain loose, boosting the influence of Paris, as the EU moves to fiscal and political union in 2014 in the wake of the eurozone debt crisis.
In a concerted campaign to keep Britain in Europe, Germany and senior European officials have warned that British demands to be able to "cherry pick" which bits of the EU it signs up to could unravel the whole bloc.
Herman Van Rompuy, the EU president, yesterday warned that if countries like Britain were allowed to pick and choose then the whole European edifice would crumble.
"If every member state were able to cherry-pick those parts of existing policies that they most like, and opt out of those that they least like, the union in general, and the single market in particular, would soon unravel," he told The Guardian.
Read more of this report from The Telegraph.