SHAME he’s not the most dynamic politician around. But Iain Duncan Smith, the self-styled ‘quiet man’ when he led the Tories from 2001 to 2003, last weekend produced a striking image of Britain in the EU.

Wanting out, he remarked: “We are bound to this ship sailing perilously close to the rocks.”

While he didn’t name them, we might – the Shattered Sovereignty Rocks. Though largely invisible until this possibly last minute of our EU voyage, they have been charted, more than once, since the distant origins of the EU 75 years ago.

In 1941 Altiero Spinelli, an Italian politician, drafted a plan to create a “United States of Europe”. Anticipating nation-state opposition he argued that secrecy would need to be the watchword of the process, with measures put in place very gradually. But he foresaw ultimate Europe-wide “acclamation” for the achievement. The Brussels HQ of the EU parliament bears his name.

In 1951 the foundation of what became the EU, current alias of our Shattered Sovereignty Rocks, were laid in the unlikely form of a six-nation European Steel and Coal Community.

But Spinelli’s grander idea had fermented strongly with a French diplomat named Jean Monnet. He began pressing for “a Government for Europe”.

However, dismayed by the conflicting national interests that had scuppered the League of Nations, precursor of the UN, for which he had been Deputy General Secretary, he too urged stealth. In 1952 he actually told the UN: “The European nations should be led towards a superstate without their people understanding what is happening.” Monnet is regarded as the father of the EU.

Now come to Britain in 1971. As we prepared for entry two years later in what was then the European Economic Community, a Foreign Office briefing, headed Sovereignty and Community, stated that community law would override our own. Forecasting that this would breed a “popular feeling of alienation from government,” it urged ministers “not to exacerbate public concern by attributing unpopular measures to the remote and unmanageable workings of the Community”. Unearthed through the 30-year-rule in 2002, the briefing estimated that by adopting its strategy, governments might maintain the illusion of sovereignty “for this century at least”.

Through that time and beyond, the original coal and steel federation has morphed first into the EEC, then the EC (European Community) and now the EU. But the deadliest of those Shattered Sovereignty Rocks – the commitment to “ever closer union” and the binding law that no national power ceded to the centre can be recovered – have been present since the crucial Treaty of Rome in 1957.

And the drive towards a superstate has not diminished. In 2012 EU Commission president Jose Manual Barroso pledged to transform the EU into “a political union… this is what we need”. In 2014 Viviane Reding, once vicepresident, similarly urged: “We need to build a United States of Europe.”

Subsumed in a superstate is this voyage’s certain end. But in 2012 Chancellor George Osborne said our involvement should be limited to the single market. David Cameron also declared: “Far from there being too little Europe, there’s too much.” Against the strong, increasingly-evident, tide of the “European project” can he, or you, really believe there will ever be less?