The Daily Telegraph has revealed that Yorkshire millionaire Paul Sykes intends to spend £10million on a new Eurosceptic campaign which will be, according to him “an outbreak of truth”.

The “Speak Out” campaign will include a call centre, a website, adverts in national newspapers and a letter to every single household in Britain, with the intention of breaking the “conspiracy of silence” over Europe.

Apart from the disappointment of finding out Mr Sykes isn’t an avid reader of this blog – I’m not known for my reticence to discuss European issues – this is worrying news.

I too, would like the European debate to feature more prominently in this country but a debate is not what Mr Sykes has in mind. As the Telegraph explains, Speak Out accuses the government of surrendering to an “undemocratic and unaccountable” Brussels and reveals that the advertisements will include the following:

“Our MPs have betrayed us. They have given away powers that were not theirs to give. More than half our laws — some people say as much as 80 per cent — originate not in the debating chambers of our elected Parliament but behind closed doors in Brussels."

Despite the considerable wedge Sykes has thrown at this project, he has presumably not budgeted for basic research. If he had the House of Commons library will have told him that only nine percent of UK law originates from the European Union.

And of course, legislation from "Brussels" is in fact adopted by ministers from elected national governments in the Council and elected MEPs in the Parliament, which amounts to a double dose of democratic scrutiny. And not "behind closed doors" - the European Parliament has always met in public (including all its committees, unlike Westminster) and the Council does too now.

Somehow I doubt Mr Sykes will be correcting his advertisements in time for next Monday’s launch of Speak Out. Instead every single household in the country will presumably receive deliberately misleading mail-shots railing against the European Union.

Hardly an outbreak of truth!