Tom Peck's Sketch: Couldn’t make it up? Boris Johnson shows us the way

In 1993, Mr Johnson wrote an article claiming the grand Berlaymont building, home of the European Commission, was soon to become the subject of a controlled demolition - it is still standing

(BBC )

Straight bananas; a ban on prawn cocktail crisps; mandatory toys for pigs – there’s a reason so much nonsense has been talked about the European Union over the years.

And that reason is a young, blonde-haired Brussels correspondent at The Daily Telegraph, keen to make a good impression (very keen in fact, because he’d already been sacked by The Times by this point), who spent half the 1990s making it all up.

In 1993 this man, who you may have guessed is now Mayor of London, wrote an article claiming the grand Berlaymont building, home of the European Commission, was soon to become the subject of a controlled demolition. It is still standing.

The demolition job notwithstanding, such stories tend to survive because the truth is a dry, tedious affair by comparison. And on that basis, Mr Johnson’s cross-examination at the hands of Andrew Tyrie, chair of the Treasury Select Committee – and drier than a coffee morning in January at Jeremy Corbyn’s house – could be considered almost a quarter of a century in the making.

When Boris outed himself as a Brexiter in his Telegraph column last month, he cited a number of other “ludicrous EU rules”, including that “you can’t recycle a teabag, or that children under eight cannot blow up balloons”.

These too, it transpired, did not bear scrutiny.

“What it actually says, Boris, because I’ve got the toy safety directive here, it actually says that children under eight can choke or suffocate, and is requiring that this warning be placed on the packaging,” Mr Tyrie told him, as his editors in his youngers days arguably should have done.

“It’s not true, though, to say there is an EU regulation or directive that prohibits people from recycling teabags,” he continued. “It’s a misrepresentation to say people are being prevented from recycling teabags.”

When Boris gets rattled, he ruffles his hair. An aide of his once told me that when he campaigned for the London mayoralty in 2008, he had to pay her £20 if he ruffled his hair live on television. By the fourth hour of this morning’s events, she would have pocketed a fortune.

At one point he produced a sheet of paper, which he claimed was “research, hot off the press”, showing that more than half of British legislation is now produced by the EU. Mr Tyrie patiently explained it was published in 2014 – “but you weren’t to know” – and that it clearly states that the findings “can be used to justify a figure of between 14 and 59 per cent”.

It also transpired that the EU teabag outrage came in response to a British request, in the wake of foot-and-mouth: used teabags have been in contact with milk.

Ah, but now it was all “overzealous British local councils’ fault” for applying these directives too strictly: “gold-plating” them, no less.

This particular argument raged for so long that Mr Tyrie brought it to a forcible end. “We shall move on,” he said. “People can form their own view about the composting of teabags.”

Does any of this stuff matter? Well, Boris and the rest of the Brexit gang are making big arguments as well as small ones. Bigger even than the recyclability of a teabag. Things like Britain being able to negotiate its own free trade agreements with other EU countries in virtually no time at all. They cite the Canada example.

Rachel Reeves, not the liveliest of interrogators but, you know, a former economist at the Bank of England, which does give her some credibility, pointed out that it had taken Canada seven years to negotiate theirs, the sort of time span that small businesses, and the people who work for them, don’t tend to think in.

“Have you got any evidence for your claim that an agreement could be negotiated in two years?” Ms Reeves asked him. “It is absolutely nonsensical that Britain will cease to trade; 70 per cent of our non-EU trade is done without any trade deals whatsoever,” he answered, before segueing back to his default analogy of the Millennium bug.

“I’m not going to ask you to stop interrupting again,” the chair warned. “Address your answer to the question. When I ask you to quieten down I’d be grateful if you did.”