Barack Obama has been branded the "most anti-British" US president in history by Ukip leader Nigel Farage.

The prominent Leave campaigner took aim at Mr Obama ahead of the American president's visit to Britain next week in which he is expected to express support for the Remain cause.

"Mercifully, this American president, who is the most anti-British American president there has ever been, won't be in office for much longer, and I hope will be replaced by somebody rather more sensible when it comes to trading relationships with this country," the Ukip leader said.

Handing the pro-EU Government pamphlet back to Number 10 Downing Street in protest at £9.3 million of taxpayers' money being used to distribute it nationally, Mr Faragechallenged Prime Minister David Cameron to a face-to-face debate on the referendum issues.

"If this leaflet had genuinely contained objective facts, I simply would not have a problem with it. But when it tells me that if we vote to remain we will keep our own border controls, when the truth is now that we have an open door to 508 million people, this isn't fact, it's false assertion,"MrFarage said.

"This needs debating properly. If Mr Cameron is so confident of what's in this leaflet, I will debate it with him, head-to-head, any place, any time, anywhere. Every country in the world has access to the single market, the truth is Britain has a rotten deal."

Mr Farage, who has publicly backed contentious Republican front-runner Donald Trump for the US presidency, is the latest leading Leave campaigner to attack Mr Obama.

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg warned that the president's expected plea for Britain to stay in the EU will flop as he accused Mr Obama of appointing IRA sympathisers to his top team.

Mr Rees-Mogg branded senior Obama administration figures "hostile to the UK" as he questioned whether the president could be considered a friend to Britain.

The Conservative MP insisted the Brexit camp had nothing to fear from an intervention by the US leader.

"I don't mind him coming over to say what he wants because I think it helps Brexit.

"I can't think the British people will want to be told what to do by a rather unsuccessful American president who has had one of the least successful foreign policies in modern history," the MP told House magazine.

Mr Rees-Mogg also criticised President Obama for choosing Joe Biden as his deputy, and John Kerry as Secretary of State, as he claimed both men had hostile attitudes towards Britain.

The North East Somerset MP said: "He has appointed as two of his closest subordinates people who have a history of hostility to the United Kingdom.

"In the 1980s Joseph Biden and John Kerry voted against extraditing our terrorists immediately after the Brighton bomb. They held it up in a Senate committee.

"They are not friends of the United Kingdom, and I don't think we should forget how disgracefully they behaved then. It's as if the UK refused to extradite terrorists to the US after 9/11.

"Bear in mind the whole Cabinet had almost been murdered. It was within a whisker of that happening. And John Kerry and Joe Biden held up an extradition treaty in the Senate because they were sympathetic to the IRA. That's really pretty shameful.

"Obama appointed them - so does that make him a great friend of Britain to whom we should listen?" the MP said.