DID the Queen urge Brexit? We’ll never know what she said about the EU, but she certainly would not have “called for Brexit”, as a red top headline screamed.

Her alleged remark that the EU was heading in the wrong direction was made back in 2011. If true it could, of course, have indicated that the Queen believed the EU should take a different direction but still with Britain on board. We’ll never know.

Perhaps more pertinent is that in 2012 David Cameron, who now appears to advocate EU membership come what may, had this say of the EU: “The British people are not happy with what they have – and neither am I. Far from there being too little Europe, there is too much. Too much cost, too much bureaucracy, too much meddling.” So there you have it: “PM calls for Brexit.”

But while what the Queen said, or might have said, remains shadowy, there’s little doubt that President Barack Obama will use a visit to this country to repeat the call he has already made for Britain to remain in the EU. I’m with Boris Johnson on this. How dare he – the US President, that is.

Would the US ever give up self-government? No chance. As Boris says, they even drag their feet over international agreements like the Convention on the Law of the Sea. They act in their own interests. Having a single European state to deal with would be mighty convenient.

Like David Cameron, President Obama urges EU membership to “exert influence”. Over the past two years the UK has voted against 18 measures in the Council of Ministers. We’ve lost the lot. Some influence, and destined to be even less if we continue to stand aside from “ever closer union” while the core presses on.

Boris Johnson gently reminded President Obama that we love liberty as much as the Americans. But do we? It’s true we’ve a record of building it up, from Magna Carta through the Bill of Rights to the long struggle for universal suffrage, not achieved until 1928, with votes for all women.

Our democracy is still far from perfect. Not all General Election votes count equally, and the elected party rarely represents the majority of the people.

Still, every five years we can chuck out our Government. But we can’t remove the unelected ‘government’ of the EU. The only means of changing its direction is the kind of humiliating overtures that David Cameron was forced to conduct to gain his feeble ‘deal’, rarely mentioned in his stay-in campaign.

Strengthening our own democracy should be our aim. Among those who felt we hadn’t done enough was the writer GK Chesterton. In a broadcast talk in 1934 he said: “Some people think that the English poor should be helped further to colonise the colonies. Some, of whom I am one, have even dared to dream that the English might be allowed to colonise England.”

In his poem The Secret People he runs through, generically, the various lords and masters we have had down the centuries, before declaring: “We are the people of England, and we have not spoken yet.” What a tragedy if, when our chance finally comes on June 23, we say: “Stuff it all. We accept the yoke of faceless masters across the Channel.”