What an extraordinary day it was in Brussels yesterday. Leading most of the papers today are the incendiary remarks made by European Council President Donald Tusk yesterday at a press conference alongside Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. At the end of a relatively short statement, Tusk opined:

“By the way, I’ve been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.”

Never mind the deeply undiplomatic nature of the comment which unsurprisingly drew much criticism, it was also totally untrue.

While David Cameron and George Osborne may have irresponsibly refused to allow the civil service to prepare for the eventuality of a Leave vote in advance of the referendum, plans were drawn up by others. As Dr Lee Rotherham reminded us here on BrexitCentral in 2016, there was Change, or go – the seminal publication from Business for Britain which ran to more than 1,000 pages. Its subtitle, “How Britain would gain influence and prosper outside an unreformed EU”, provides the clue to it being exactly what Tusk claims did not exist.

Or there was the 2014 publication, Cutting the Gordian knot: A road map for British exit from the European Union, written by Rory Broomfield and Iain Murray. There were many others too.

There’s no way that this was an off the cuff intervention from Tusk. It was clearly planned. If you watch him making the remarks on our video, you can see him referring to written notes while he said it. And he then happily tweeted the words out afterwards – prompting an equally inappropriate response from MEP Guy Verhofstadt.

And then to rub salt into the wound, at the end of the press conference, Varadkar is caught saying: “They’ll give you terrible trouble in the British press for that”, to which Tusk replies: “Yes, I know” and laughs.

What on earth was he thinking???

Moreover, many of us had already been offended by some of the earlier contents of Tusk’s short statement. Aside from the contradiction of declaring the Withdrawal Agreement “not open for re-negotiation” while demanding that Theresa May offer a “suggestion on how to end the impasse”, the former Polish Prime Minister also reminded us of the EU’s arrogant attitude to referendums which deliver the “wrong” answer.

Having claimed that “a very great number of people in the UK… wish for a reversal of this decision” to leave the EU, he lamented:

“The pro-Brexit stance of the UK Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition rules out this question… Today, there is no political force and no effective leadership for Remain”.

Some might say that the definitive result of the 2016 referendum rules out a reversal of the said decision. Call me old-fashioned, but when a parliament organises a referendum to ask the people a question, is it not duty bound to implement the answer it is given?

But of course, that’s not the EU’s way of doing things. When Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty in a 1992 referendum, they had to vote again in order to approve it. It was the same with Ireland and their Nice Treaty referendum in 2001. And when the French and Dutch electorates rejected the European Constitution in 2005, it was merely cosmetically repackaged as the Lisbon Treaty. And when the Irish rejected that in 2008, they had to vote again in order to give Brussels the answer it required.

All a salutary reminder that the EU is not so much undemocratic as anti-democratic.