Confused about the breadth and scope of the proposed constitution for the European Union? Worried about how you should vote in the referendum next year? Maybe Peter Hain can help. Here’s what the leader of the House of Commons said about it within the space of a few months in late spring 2003.

“This is not a major change . . . there is no need for a referendum.” (On PM, the BBC Radio 4 programme.) “I am not saying it has got no substantial constitutional significance, of course it will have.” (In the House of Commons.) “Our task is nothing less than the creation of a new constitutional order for a new, united Europe.” (In the Financial Times.) There, I hope that’s cleared things up. On other occasions, Mr Hain has described the constitution as nothing more than a “tidying-up exercise”, a description endorsed by Jack Straw, the foreign secretary.

There is the sort of “tidying-up exercise” you undertake after you have had a few friends around and your wife’s due back within the hour. Then there’s the sort of “tidying-up exercise” that happened to Hong Kong in 1997 or the Sudetenland in 1938.

We would need to cross examine Mr Hain and Mr Straw in some detail about their definitions of “tidying-up” before concluding they were a) lying through their teeth or b) employing the subtle literary device of litotes.

Then there’s Keith Vaz. He was once the minister for Europe and he described the EU charter of fundamental rights, to which we will all be signatories if we vote “yes” in a referendum, as having “about as much legal status as The Beano”. Again, we are mired in ambiguity. To take Keith literally, The Beano may be a comic for children, but it has unimpeachable legal status, as I’m sure D C Thomson, its publishers, would attest. Is that what Keith meant? He also described the proposed constitution as a tidying-up exercise. Almost everybody associated with new Labour used to employ that phrase. Like the pashmina and, mercifully, Keith Vaz, it has become rather de trop.

Let me tell you about something that happened four years ago, a little incident which shows you quite a lot about the government’s behaviour over the EU constitution, its general trustworthiness and its attitude to people or institutions that question its intentions.

It also brings into play some interesting characters whom, two or three years later, we were to meet again in not entirely different circumstances.

Back in November 2000 I was editor of the Today programme. One morning we ran an investigation into a document commissioned by the European commission through the University of Florence with the help of Professor Alan Dashwood, a Cambridge don. It was, we said on the programme, part of a potential blueprint for an EU constitution. Dashwood agreed.

At that time the government was adamant it would not sign up to anything called a constitution. As far as ceding power to Brussels was concerned its line was “this far and no further”. A constitution implied that more power would be ceded, so such a thing could not be on the agenda, we were told.

The reporter who carried out the investigation was Andrew Gilligan. As soon as his report was transmitted, all hell broke loose. The BBC received three furious complaints, almost identical in tone and content, from John Williams, the head of press at the Foreign Office, a pencil-necked EU bureaucrat called Jonathan Faull and a certain Alastair Campbell.

This document was old news, they screamed — and in any case did not suggest preparations were afoot for an EU constitution. At the morning lobby briefing, on November 29, Andrew Gilligan was attacked by Godric Smith, one of Campbell’s 10 Downing Street scullions. “Gullible Gilligan,” he told the lobby hacks, “falling for the Eurosceptic agenda.”

The letters of complaint to the BBC continued into 2001 until the broadcaster, with commendable resolve, finally told them to piss off for good and all.

The document was nothing more than a tidying-up exercise, the public was assured. It just ties together documents and treaties, loose ends, things like that.

Of course, we now know that a constitution was planned. It did indeed involve a considerable loss of sovereignty and the document we had revealed formed part of the blueprint, just as Gilligan had alleged.

And now, more than four years down the line, when Jack Straw talks about the proposed EU constitution he assures us it stands for “this far and no further”. Despite the fact that it involves the creation of an EU foreign minister, insists EU law is supreme over national law and, in many cases, ends the single country veto.

But then, as we have seen, when new Labour talks about the EU it always tells the public “this far and no further”. And then, quietly, it goes further and further.

Some people believe Alastair Campbell’s fury at that Today programme item contributed to his decision to eviscerate both the corporation and Gilligan three years later over the death of Dr David Kelly, the government scientist. Maybe. Frankly, I’m not sure I have the time or inclination to paddle around in Mr Campbell’s psyche. It is enough to know he is back in the saddle.

But the splenetic nature of the attack, the suborning of the Foreign Office and the EU to join in with it and the personal invective — we were to see all that once more in the summer of 2003 with the David Kelly affair.

Far more important, though, is this notion of trust. Michael Grade, the chairman of the BBC, is the latest in a procession of Establishment figures to have attacked the “cynicism” with which interviewers such as John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman are alleged to approach politicians. Such a perspective damages the democratic process, we are told, and inculcates a weariness within the public that results in them not bothering to vote.

As broadcasters, Humphrys et al have a duty to ensure that the public engages with the politics rather than become disaffected.

It is the view of the factotum who has too many politicians as friends.

For how are we to lay our cynicism aside when faced with government ministers whose answers shift with the wind? It’s a terribly unfashionable thing to say, but the old Claude Cockburn maxim: “why is this bastard lying to me?” still seems to carry a bit of force.

Call me cynical and disaffected if you like, but I have the suspicion that were you to ask Peter Hain if he thought Camilla Parker Bowles should become Queen of England following her marriage to Prince Charles, his answers would be as follows, dependent upon who was asking the question: a) yes. b) no. c) It is ridiculous to suggest there will be any such thing as a “marriage”. It is simply a tidying-up exercise.