“The City of London would become a ghost down, our manufacturing industries would be sanctioned more punitively than even communist North Korea, decades would pass before a single British Land Rover or Mr Kipling cake could ever again be sold in France and in the meantime our farmers would have been driven from the land by poverty worse than the Potato Famine. 

To cap it all, an alliance of Vladimir Putin, Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, emboldened by our weakness, would, like some geopolitical equivalent of the Penguin, Catwoman and the Joker, be liberated to spread chaos worldwide and subvert our democracy. 

I sometimes think that the In campaign appears to be operating to a script written by George RR Martin and Stephen King. Brexit would mean a combination of A Feast for Crows and Misery.

It’s a deeply pessimistic view of the British people’s potential, and a profoundly negative vision of the future which just isn’t rooted in reality. The idea that if Britain voted to leave the European Union we would instantly become some sort of hermit kingdom – a North Atlantic North Korea, only without that country’s fund of international good will – it’s a fantasy, it’s a phantom, it’s a great grotesque patronising and preposterous Peter Mandelsonian conceit, that imagines that the people of this country are mere children, capable of being frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night.”

Michael Gove sums up Project Fear and the Remain campaign’s “bogeymen”…