After the deal we still have no effective opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights. We have no new limits on the power of the European Court of Justice — described by the In campaigner and former Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, as having “predatory” qualities. We did not manage to alter the “excessive” social and employment legislation, which David Cameron had hoped to see addressed at national levels. We couldn’t stop what the Prime Minister has rightly called the “absurdly wasteful” practice of ferrying the European Parliament backwards and forwards between Strasbourg and Brussels. We had no reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy or the EU Structural Funds. And we had no safe “proper full-on” treaty change.

The opening line of the summary of the deal summed it all up. The EU President Donald Tusk confessed that everything was “in conformity with the Treaties”. He couldn’t have been clearer that the deal would alter nothing about how the EU actually works.

And as for the hope there may be change in the future, the French President, François Hollande, has made clear there’s no chance, declaring “no revision of the Treaties is planned”.

We have to be honest about the lack of reform. The deal with other EU nations doesn’t return a single power from Brussels to nation states, doesn’t reduce wasteful EU spending by a penny, doesn’t get rid of a single job-destroying regulation or display even a glimmer of a scintilla of a recognition that the EU might be anything other than a Garden of Eden from which no one should wish to be excluded.

But what makes the deal particularly problematic for us in Britain is not just failure to reform the EU this time round, but the surrender of our veto over future changes.

The deal specifies that countries such as Britain which may not want to see further integration will give up their ability to stop others; they “will not create obstacles to but [will] facilitate such further deepening”.

It has always been critical to the defence of our interests in Europe that we can block other countries at critical moments and make sure our needs are met before others can make new arrangements. The PM made good use of that power in 2011 when he vetoed plans for further integration that didn’t take account of Britain’s needs. Under the new Brussels deal, that power would be lost.

But if we reject the deal in the forthcoming referendum, we will regain our old advantage and retain the veto. Our negotiating hand with the EU will actually be strengthened. In any discussion of new arrangements between Britain and the EU after we leave, the other countries will know that because we retain a veto over their plans until we’re happy with our future they must move swiftly to meet our needs.