I never cease to be impressed with Dan Hannan MEP's ingenuity. He is a master at twisting any subject, no matter how esoteric, into a platform for his anti-European prejudices.

Reviewing a book on ancient Rome in the Telegraph, he draws a strained parallel between the fall of the empire and the modern-day European Union. Of course, the attempted analogy is gloriously silly, and he knows it.

Even setting aside the obvious differences between a voluntary union of sovereign countries and an empire established through military might, it seems Dan Hannan's politics are as shaky as his history. His comments about an over-centralised bureaucracy are wide of the mark: the European Commission is a tiny body, with fewer employees than Leeds city council in my constituency.

And no "large foreign populations" have been imported, although last year we did welcome into our Union eight fledgling democracies, all of which were under totalitarian rule until only a few years earlier.

Anyway, if Mr Hannan wants to push the analogy, no doubt he will remember what happened when the Pax Romana finally collapsed? There was no glorious era of self-government; instead, Europe was swamped by the barbaric Dark Ages, an era from which it took centuries to surface.

Now, who says we have nothing to learn from history?