As the International Herald Tribune noted in a news piece on the day of the vote, “[w]ith 287 pages of vintage bureaucratese, the Lisbon treaty, which would, among other things, give the European Union its first full-time president and a powerful foreign policy chief, is hard to explain. Few voters fully understand the treaty or even want to try.”

Much was and will be said of the reasons for a “No” vote – including the arcane language of the treaty, its impossible length and the democratic deficit that accompanied its drafting after its unlucky and now defunct predecessor was voted down. Another reason should be added to the list. Only a few days after the Irish vote, the BBC reported that the European Commission found itself bogged down in the following controversy: “The European Commission says it wants to loosen the rules that prevent knobbly fruit and vegetables being sold alongside more shapely examples.” Why a regulation on the twists and turns of a parsnip or a cucumber would have afflicted EU bureaucrats is itself worth pondering – and perhaps a reflection of the EU’s sometimes excessive regulatory tendencies. But this is not the strangest thing of all. That would be the fact that “the Commission says its efforts to simplify EU legislation have been resisted by some countries”.

Nor was the Commission trying to introduce radical change – limiting its sudden deregulation urge to only 10 out of 26 agricultural products on which it thought it necessary to determine shape, weight and size, among other regulated aspects of the fruits and vegetables in question. Take for example Regulation 1757/2003, which amended Regulation 1292/81. 1292/81 was about courgettes, leeks, and aubergines. But the EU “realized” that a separate regulation was needed for courgettes only: “In the interest of clarity, the rules on courgettes should be separated from those on other products,” recites the regulation with a certain gravitas. So to simplify matters, more regulations were passed.