It must have been a painful dilemma for Eurosceptic newspaper editors when they were faced with a choice between having a go at the EU and having a go at Tony Blair. When the Prime Minister made a slip in an otherwise excellent speech and said that a seesaw had been dismantled because of spurious EU regulations, there was no clear line from the right-wing press about how to report the error.

The Evening Standard went one way, sacrificing accuracy at the altar of reactionary Euroscepticism:

"Tony Blair today launched an unprecedented attack on Brussels… [Mr Blair] raised the case of a Cotswold village required to pull up a seesaw because it was judged a danger under an EU directive on outside playgrounds."

Meanwhile, you can almost hear the teeth grinding in the editor's office as the Telegraph decides to point the mistake:

"Tony Blair was caught out yesterday for falsely claiming that a European Union directive had forced a Cotswolds village to rip out its playground seesaw - when no such directive exists. Playgrounds are, in fact, not regulated by the EU."

Fortunately, the European Commission is on hand to break the deadlock.

"This little tale first surfaced in 2000 and found a home in a number of newspapers willing to peddle it. Now the Evening Standard has jumped on the merry-go-round [boom, boom] of blaming non-existent EU rules for depriving children of their seesaws, while the prime minister appears to have, albeit unintentionally, recycled an old euromyth.

"There is no EU Directive on Playground Equipment for Outside Use. No village in the Cotswolds has been forced to take down its seesaws, or swings or slides.

"The prime minister may have been referring to European Standard EN 1176-5, drawn up by the European Committee for Standardisation. This is a non-EU body made up of standards institutions from 28 European countries, including the British Standards Institution. It sets guidelines for products in order to improve consumer safety. But these guidelines are entirely voluntary."