LONDON: US President Barack Obama plunged into Britain’s increasingly poisonous EU debate on Friday with a powerful warning against Brexit, arguing that US soldiers had laid down their lives for Europe.

Obama’s rare foray into the domestic politics of another country comes ahead of Britain’s EU membership referendum in June and drew a furious response from euroskeptics like London Mayor Boris Johnson.

Writing in the Daily Telegraph, a traditional bastion of euroskepticism, Obama argued that Britain’s place in the European Union magnified its global influence and invoked the memory of US troops who died in two world wars.

“I realize that there’s been considerable speculation — and some controversy — about the timing of my visit,” he wrote in a piece published at the start of his four-day trip to Britain.

“I will say, with the candour of a friend, that the outcome of your decision is a matter of deep interest to the United States.

“Tens of thousands of Americans who rest in Europe’s cemeteries are a silent testament to just how intertwined our prosperity and security truly are.

“And the path you choose now will echo in the prospects of today’s generation of Americans.”

Johnson, the leading face of the euroskeptic campaign, said it was “downright hypocritical” of the US to intervene as it would not accept the same limits on its own sovereignty as EU members do.

“For the United States to tell us in the UK that we must surrender control of so much of our democracy is a breathtaking example of the principle of do as I say, not as I do,” Johnson wrote in The Sun tabloid.

Johnson also repeated claims that “part-Kenyan” Obama may have removed a statue of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office at the start of his first term out of “ancestral dislike of the British Empire.”

The White House has previously rejected the allegation over the bust of the British wartime leader as “completely false.”

Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokeswoman also dismissed it Friday, saying: “Let’s focus on facts.”

Asked about the controversy at a campaign event, anti-EU UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage told AFP: “Obama doesn’t like the British very much.

His grandfather grew up in Kenya, a former British colony. He’s still got some bad feelings about that.”