Former Tory Prime Minister Ted Heath (his time in office ended in ignominy in 1974) is warning that a British rejection of the Euro at this stage would be “the first of a series of slippery steps that would allow anti-Europeans to push Britain towards the exit door from the EU.”

Well, Heath, the man who took the UK into what was then the EEC (or ‘Common Market’ as we Brits used then, hopefully – and naively – to call it) back in 1973 knows a thing or two about ‘slippery slopes’. At that time (and in a subsequent referendum in 1975), British voters were repeatedly assured that the European project only involved a more extensive form of free trade zone. Since then, the EEC (European Economic ‘Community’) became the EC (European Community) and now, most poisonously, the EU. Those are quite some steps. The most slippery thing about them? The politicians who pushed the UK down them.

Starting with Ted Heath.