Writing in his column in the Mail on Sunday today, Peter Hitchens is perhaps the first non-Breitbart journalist to pick up on the fact that ‘Vote Leave‘ – run by Conservative Party figures Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott – don’t really want to leave the European Union.

Breitbart London has covered this at length previously, with the reporting culminating in a Twitter spat between UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage and Vote Leave spokesman Daniel Hannan whereby the former challenged the latter on the idea of a double referendum.

The ‘Vote Leave’ campaign is also backed by UKIP’s MP Douglas Carswell, a close and unswerving friend of Mr. Hannan, as well as his staff member Suzanne Evans, and his young friend Robin Hunter Clarke who stood for UKIP at the General Election. Their involvement with the campaign to effectively keep Britain in a two-tier European Union has sparked concern on their behalves that they will be removed from the party ahead of the vote.

Mr. Hitchens notes:

The ‘exit’ campaign was last week cunningly taken over by Tories who don’t want to leave the Superstate and will use a vote to leave (if it happens) as the basis for yet another round of negotiations with Brussels.

…

Lord Howard led a Left-liberal putsch against the genuine EU opponent Iain Duncan Smith in 2003. Mr Johnson is an act, not a politician. He is a keen Europhile, and to conceal it from his fans he will do so many U-turns between now and referendum day that they will look like a series of S-bends.

Both men’s weird declarations of support for Brexit were cunningly hedged.

And the London Mayor was careful to state: ‘I will be advocating vote “leave”… because I want a better deal for the people of this country to save them money and to take back control.’

Read this carefully (as you always should) and you will realise there’s no clear declaration that he wants our national independence back. But there is a desire for a ‘deal’. Likewise his supposed reversal last Saturday wasn’t really as clear as it looked. Be assured. If there is a majority to leave there will be a second poll and a search for a new deal.

What sort of deal? Lord Howard was more specific. In an article which was lazily reported as a ‘blow for David Cameron’, he explicitly said that he saw a vote to leave as a way of restarting negotiations on how to stay in: ‘There is only one thing that just might shake Europe’s leaders out of their complacency: the shock of a vote by the British people to leave.’

He added: ‘We would be sorely missed. If the UK voted to leave, there would be a significant chance that they would ask us to think again. When Ireland and Denmark voted to reject EU proposals, the EU offered them more concessions and, second time round, got the result they wanted.’

Lord Howard went on to explain how happy he would be for Britain to be a semi-detached part of a two-tier EU – something very much on the cards as the EU moves into its next phase of integration, two or three years hence. ‘We – and others – could say to the integrationists, “We don’t want to stop you doing what you want to do as long as you don’t make us do what we don’t want to do.” ’

You read it first here. The EU is like the Hotel California. You can check out. But you can never leave.

This referendum, which was never supposed to happen at all, is a sham for which I refuse to fall.