OK OK, I admit it. If you gave him a truth drug, or hypnotised him, I don’t think even the prime minister would really deny it.

This European Union deal is not perhaps everything that we would have liked. It is not what we Eurosceptics were hoping, not when the process kicked off. We were hoping he was going to get really deep down and dirty, in the way that the Bloomberg speech seemed to indicate. He was going to probe the belly of the beast and bring back British sovereignty, like Hercules bringing Eurydice [sic] back from the underworld. I had the impression that this was going to be the beginning of a wholesale repatriation of powers — over fisheries, farming, the social chapter,