IN case you were wondering, I’ve been hiding under the bed for a while, hoping to escape the endless palaver about next month’s EU referendum. But I’ve just come out from under after reading some remarks by Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the unelected European Commission which governs Europe.

In a scarcely-veiled reference to David Cameron, Juncker said, “Prime ministers must stop listening so much to their voters and instead act as full-time Europeans. Elected leaders are making life difficult because they spend too much time kowtowing to public opinion rather than working on historic projects like the Euro.”

This cat has been out of the bag for a long time and there’s no chance of stuffing it back in. But it’s useful to have the fact confirmed by the president of the Commission.

The declared aim of the European project was from the start, back in the 1940s, the dissolving of national identities and the creation of a superstate. Jean Monnet, a founding father of the EU, wrote to a friend on 30th April, 1952: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”

Successive treaties have brought the superstate ever closer. And so have particular interventions into the affairs of individual nation states by the EU Commission.

For example, back in 2011 the Commission ordered the Italian president to appoint a former EU bureaucrat Mario Monti as prime minister. On August 19, 2015, the skint Greek government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Commission effectually surrendering its economic and political policies to the EU.

There are many good reasons for voting leave on June 23. And plenty of lies to be exposed. We will not lose trade if we vote to quit. The EU is not a free trade area, but a customs union which forces us to pay high tariffs if we wish to trade with the wider world. We already run a trade deficit with the EU anyhow. We have suffered catastrophic economic damage at the hands of the EU.

Last week the BBC gave us a programme about Whitby where now there’s only one trawler when once there were dozens. The EU has destroyed our fishing industry. And we all pay higher prices for food than we should, because of the Common Agricultural Policy, created to subsidise inefficient French farmers.

European countries will not stop trading with us if we leave. Governments have nothing to sell, but do you think those German companies which make splendid cars and washing machines won’t want us to buy them anymore? Or that the French will stop selling us claret and Sauvignon blanc? Tins of tomatoes will continue to come from Italy, and Greeks would be even more skint if they could no longer sell us their olive oil.

Laughably, they tell us we won’t be secure against Islamic State if we leave. Just as they were saying this, Brussels was being shot to pieces by Muslim terrorists.

Never mind the £350m we pay in subs every week. Never mind the EU taxes and regulations by which the Commissioners aim to cripple London as the world’s financial hub. The overarching reason to get out is the once creeping but now galloping movement towards realisation of the European agenda of “ever closer political union.” First the Euro, now the proposal for a single European army.

No thanks Mr Juncker – I’m going back under the bed.