If ever there were a reason why Britain should leave the European Union, it was that blueprint for its future laid out last week by Jean-Claude Juncker, Commission president. The moment Britain leaves, he proposed, the EU must take a further giant leap forward to becoming a single state, with a single president, completely controlling the financial affairs of the countries making it up, which will all have to join the euro.

In fact, there is so little new about this plan that in essence it is merely fulfilling a blueprint first sketched out 84 years ago, in a book called The United States of Europe. It was written by a close ally of Jean Monnet, the man who years later was to do more than anyone else to shape the details of what would eventually become the EU.

The only difference was that, by the Fifties, Monnet realised that their dream could not be realised overnight. It should, therefore, be assembled stealthily, bit by bit, without for a long time declaring its real goal. And they should begin by pretending that it was just an economic arrangement, a “Common Market”; which was why, when Richard North and I first unearthed this story, we called our book The Great Deception.