and real the purpose of every law and regulation they propose is to invrease the power of the Commission and its bureaucracy. When I worked in Luxembourg in the late 1980s my project was described as streamlining and standardising the collection of trade data. It turned out in reality to be about introducing a centralised system of processing the data to make the EU look good. And of course there were to be heavy penalties for nations and businesses that did not comply.

It was a frustrating project to work on, but the upside was nobody batted an eyelid when I and my translator Marie took off for a four day ‘fact finding’ mission, on expenses, to Bruges.