Nigel Farage has a new friend. Jose Manuel ‘Sound Bite’ Barroso. He must be doing handstands over the nearly-ex Brussels boss saying Cameron’s plans for immigration limits are a mirage.

He thinks he has shot Dave’s fox. And it must be said that if the tactic is to limit the issuance of NI numbers, the latest cunning plan, then Barroso is surely right because it will simply encourage the black economy.

According to him, ‘free movement of people’ is a fundamental EU principle that can’t be changed. Really? The free movement of goods and services is another fundamental principle that can’t be changed, unless, of course, by Germany that has refused to implement the rules on services since the single market was first introduced way back when.

And there is the small business of the 3 percent limit on budget deficits that both Germany and France ignored, giving the green light to the spend, spend, spent of the Club Med that has left them in the merde.

This is what the Chairman of the Tory Party riposted:

'Barroso’s only the latest person from Europe to tell us we’ll never get what we want. But remember, we were never going to get the rebate that Margaret Thatcher successfully got; we were never going to get to pull back powers but we’ve done that for a whole lot of competences; we were never going to get a cut in the EU budget, people said that was impossible, but David Cameron’s negotiated that. There are lots of impossible things that we’ve managed to do in Europe.’

Barroso is formerly of the extreme left, and his Marxist propensity to invert language so that ‘truth’ becomes ‘lies’ and ‘lies’ become’ truth is plain to see.

He tells us that outside the EU the UK will have ‘no influence’. A country of 63 million people, the healthiest economy in the OECD and one of the top six in the world, the only EU country with a credible military capacity (with the possible exception of France), with international relationships beyond anything achieved by the EU, cannot punch its weight outside the Club?

As for Europe, Henry Kissinger is alleged to have put his finger on it. ‘If I want to call Europe, who do I call?’ As an entity, the EU has no influence worthy of the name. It is not the super state that he and his ilk are driving for, so it cannot have any international clout overall.

Neither can it have coherent policies on very much at all, apart from meddling and aggrandising itself. Its ambitions to destroy proud old nations and to impose its undemocratic will on 300 million people will end in tears.

It has zero defence capacity despite the pathetic attempts to create a rival to NATO. The Eurozone is dysfunctional. EU countries are in economic disarray with many facing severe recession.

But Barroso is unable to resist the bully-boy scare-mongering that is the default position in Brussels. He says that Brexit would mean that the UK becomes a becomes an economic pariah and that the EU would boycott it.

Really? The UK is the biggest European export market. It consistently runs a balance of trade deficit with the EU countries. Does he expect us to believe that Europe would cut off its collective nose

He even brought Ebola into his farrago. Quite what this has to do with anything is opaque, but all that did was to make us bless the English Channel.

To return to the real world, the simple truth is that in politics nothing is immutable, not even EU treaties.

He and others are saying that immigration restrictions would be ‘illegal’. Actually they would be in breach of our treaty obligations, which is not quite the same thing.

A change would require the consent of every member of the EU so its likelihood is so remote as to be totally unachievable. Changing the rules on benefits is another matter; this would simply require a majority of members and of the EU Parliament. There is evidence of support for this, especially from Germany.

Cameron will probably get away with this, but this is nowhere near enough: his commitment is to reduce the sheer numbers allowed in.

One option, and a very inadequate one, would be an emergency brake that would impose temporary controls on immigration flows. The fatal flaw in this is that it doesn’t restore Britain’s control of its own borders and would simply be a ‘sticking plaster’ solution.

There is no way in which UKIP or the Europhiles would go for it. Other options might be quotas or points-based systems which already exist elsewhere. These have almost no chance of success as they would require treaty amendments.

So it is beginning to look as if Emperor Cameron has no clothes. Unless there is a massive but unlikely shift in the Brussels stance, his renegotiation of the terms of membership are simply doomed. Farage knows this very well. That’s why he is always smiling.

Robin Mitchinson is a Contributing Editor to The Commentator. A former barrister, living in the Isle of Man, he is an international public management specialist with almost two decades of experience in institutional development, decentralisation and democratisation processes. He has advised governments and major international institutions across the world