What makes this episode all the more eerie is that it occurred in the 1990s, before the Nice Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty had extended EU powers much further still. Not only was the UK public to be deterred from knowing the extent of the transfer of power from the House of Commons to Brussels, but members of the Conservative Cabinet professed ignorance themselves. When I spoke to an academic colleague in Germany, who was a senior adviser to the then Chancellor Helmut Kohl, he said he would very much like to see any results I could obtain, since he thought that the German Chancellor was just as much in the dark as the British Prime Minister.

More recently, the coalition government carried out a lengthy exercise led by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office to survey, department by department, the so-called “balance of competences” between the UK and the EU. The title itself embodied the assumption that there can be such a “balance” and that the existing situation is satisfactory. This indeed was the predictable conclusion of a survey dominated by the avidly pro-EU Liberal Democrat academic Lord Wallace of Saltaire and consisting in part of consultation with mandarins and an undisclosed set of academics. Moreover, the complex of nearly three dozen separate reports omitted to present the crucial list of things which, under the existing EU treaties, now fall within the remit of the EU.

The only feature of the UK’s relationship with authoritative supra-national institutions which is the subject of serious public debate has been the power of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg vis-à-vis that of the House of Commons. The current Conservative government is committed to recoup power from the court to the UK parliament. The issue is so complex and fraught that it has delayed presenting proposals which reportedly had been ready before the 2015 general election.

But senior lawyers such as the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve consider that the challenge to national sovereignty from the Court of Justice of the European Union — the court in Luxembourg — is actually far greater under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty of 2009. Like so much else concerning the strategy of EU expansionism, the precise implications of this treaty are murky and subject to disagreement among experts.

The issue is the incorporation of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights into EU law in the Lisbon Treaty and the meaning of the opt-out obtained by the UK. The Charter of Fundamental Rights goes far wider than the European Convention on Human Rights of the Council of Europe. It includes wide-ranging social, educational, health, constitutional and economic rights phrased in terms so general that, as pointed out by Chris Grayling, the then Lord Chancellor, on November 13, 2013, the Lisbon Treaty puts “huge power” in the hands of the EU court in Luxembourg: “We cannot go on seeing crucial decisions about our society and our system of justice and government being taken by unaccountable international courts.” The power of the Luxembourg court, he suggested, would be part of the renegotiation with the EU prior to the EU referendum.