Last week I found myself debating the UK’s membership of the EU on the radio with the immensely likeable Digby Jones, a proud Brummie, a former trade minister, a businessman, a Brexiteer — and also a member of the House of Lords.

As a Brexit peer he is in good company: Norman Lamont, Norman Tebbit, David Owen, Michael Howard, Nigel Lawson and other lords also support Britain’s exit. From their lofty perch they berate the EU for being economically deficient, expensive, bureaucratic and, above all, undemocratic. Without the slightest hint of irony, Lord Lawson has declared that “one of the most unattractive aspects of the European integrationist movement is its contempt for democracy”. Pots and kettles immediately spring to mind.

It is one thing to criticise the eurozone for its economic difficulties — which, to be fair, was the focus of Jones’s comments — but quite another to pontificate about the democratic deficiencies of the EU from one of the most bloated, and unelected, legislative chambers in the world?

With more than 800 members, the House of Lords is only second to China’s National People’s Congress in size and is about as undemocratic: unique in Europe, its members can revise and amend the laws of the land without anyone actually being elected. It is, in short, an affront to the basic democratic principle that those who make the laws of the land should be elected by those who obey the laws of the land.

Yet this obvious inconsistency appears to have escaped Lord Lawson et al when they berate the EU as “profoundly undemocratic”. I find what they do every day in the House of Lords profoundly undemocratic too.

Similarly, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Chris Grayling and the other Brexit ministers appear to be entirely untroubled that they serve in a Government that garnered no more than 24 per cent of the eligible vote. Such an undemocratic outcome — wielding unchallenged power when three quarters of voters either voted for another party or didn’t vote at all — is, it seems, acceptable to these high priests of democratic virtue.

The truth is that our own democracy is in need of a complete overhaul. Westminster is hopelessly stuck in the past: MPs are not allowed to shake each other’s hands on the parliamentary estate; we can’t call each other by our names and must instead use arcane titles such as “my right honourable friend” or “the gallant and learned gentleman”. We are not allowed to clap in the Commons so we register our approval by manically guffawing and waving papers instead.

The chamber, designed to encourage confrontation, is often full of puce-faced, middle-aged men gurning and shouting at each other from a few feet apart. There was even a rifle range below the House of Lords until it finally closed last year and the cloakrooms have hooks for MPs to hang their swords. It is hardly a reflection of modern Britain.

The answer, obviously, is to reform it. That’s what I tried to do — with limited success — during five years in government. As the two larger, established parties blocked all meaningful reform — to party funding, to the House of Lords, to our electoral system — I became increasingly frustrated at the way the Conservative and Labour Parties protected their vested interests. I left office considerably more anti-establishment than when I first entered government.

But my frustration only redoubled my belief in the case for political reform. One day, the self-serving defenders of the House of Lords will have to give way. One day, the lopsided electoral system will be replaced by a fairer one. One day, the practice of big money giving the Conservatives an unfair advantage at election time will be reformed.

What I would never advocate, however, is that Westminster and Whitehall should be razed to the ground or that we should quit our democratic institutions altogether. Yet that is precisely what Brexiteers are inviting us to do: respond to the flaws in the EU, which are numerous, by turning our backs on it altogether.

EU decision-making is complex and laborious. Far from being some superstate rampaging out of control, my experience is that it is simply far too slow at getting things done because everything, by and large, has to be agreed between 28 sovereign countries.

It took the EU almost 30 years, for instance, to agree a common definition of chocolate — in part because the continental purists objected to the inclusion of vegetable fat, found in many British chocolate bars, as a key ingredient. A common definition was important to British chocolate exporters because it allowed them, once the vegetable fat dilemma had been resolved, to export to 500 million European chocolate consumers without any impediment.

'Unique in Europe, the House of Lords can revise and amend the laws of the land without anyone actually being elected' Nick Clegg

A body that takes three decades to define chocolate can be described as many things — not least slow and bureaucratic — but an undemocratic conspiracy is hardly one of them.

Yes, there is a small Brussels bureaucracy, the European Commission, which has the right to propose (not — please note, Brexiteers — to impose) new laws; there are MEPs who have the power to block and amend EU laws; yet the real decision-making authority rests largely with the member states themselves in the Council of Ministers.

The fundamental flaw in such a system is not that Britain fails to get its way — we win more than 90 per cent of the decisions taken — it is just that it is tediously long-winded. I guess there are some ways to address this — a further extension of qualified majority voting, for instance — but they would be anathema to many pro- and anti-Europeans alike.

The one solution that I am convinced would not work is simply to throw our hands up in the air, quit the EU altogether and wait for the whole thing to come crashing down.

Yet that is precisely what the Brexiteers are campaigning for: complacency at home and a failure of nerve abroad.