History will remember this day as a day when new paths of hope were opened to the European ideal.” Thus spoke José Sócrates, the Prime Minister of Portugal, at the signing ceremony of the European treaty that dares not speak its true name.

Pass the hemlock. And the sick bag. The “European ideal” consists, it is now evident, of imposing on voters far-reaching changes to the way they are to be governed, without allowing them a look-in, or a voice. The “path of hope” beckons only to Europe's most messianic federalists: it consists of a treaty clause that says that governments may in future cede powers to Brussels without consulting their parliaments, let alone their cussed voters.

History will indeed have a word for this: perfidy. Every single one of the 27 signatories of the Lisbon treaty is guilty of a breach of the democratic compact, monumental in its arrogance. Every one of them knows that, shorn of a few preambular paragraphs, chopped up and reassembled in a deliberately unreadable jumble of “amendments”, it resurrects the EU constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters. Other than Ireland's Bertie Ahern, who is legally obliged to do so, not one of them dares to ask the voters what they think of “Constitution II”.

No wonder: under EU law, the French and Dutch “no” should have buried it for good. To graft it back on to existing EU treaties was a shabby bit of legal trickery. The ruse appears to have worked; there has been barely a whisper of continental protest. Even so, voters do not like being bamboozled and might, were they to be balloted, make that plain. Jacques Delors made no bones about where democracy fitted in the EU, declaring: “Je suis un top-downer.” They are all top-downers now. Including Gordon Brown.

Mr Brown's choice was to insist on replacing this illegitimate monster with a genuine mini-treaty, to the fury of his colleagues although not, perhaps, their electorates; or pretend that it changes nothing, and bluster his way out of his electoral pledge to put it to the British people. He chose bluster. It was an error of judgment, and a desertion of principle. A man who prided himself on plain dealing now affects to believe that he can fool all of the people into accepting that this is all much Tory ado about nothing, provided he never ceases to repeat: “This is not a constitution.”

Mr Brown is living a lie. His pathetic scheme to airbrush himself out of the picture yesterday shows that he knows it. Expect him now to mount the Burkean defence that complex questions involving the national interest are better left to Parliament. This normally powerful argument does not hold when the purpose of taking the parliamentary rather than the referendum route is not to represent the electorate more effectively, but to flout its will. Mr Brown sheds tears for democracy. In Africa. He is more dry-eyed at home.

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