David Cameron can only get all he wants by first leaving the EU When I predicted last June that the EU's bizarre choice of Jean-Claude Juncker as its new Commission president would leave it in an even "worse mess than David Cameron" (who had just been outvoted on the appointment by 26-2), even I could not have foreseen how quickly this would blow up in the faces of all those responsible. The revelation that, as his country's prime minister and finance minister, Mr Juncker presided over a colossal tax-avoidance scam worth hundreds of billions of euros, all at the expense of the EU's other members, is bad enough. Even worse, his insistence that he should personally preside over the Commission's inquiry into a scandal in which he was so intimately involved must surely have left him, as "the most powerful man in Europe," holed irreparably below the waterline. But Mr Cameron's own reckless suggestion that, unless the EU changes its treaty rules to limit immigration to the UK, it will push us ever-nearer to the exit, highlights just how utterly confused and empty his own policy towards Europe has become. Like Sir John Major, Mr Cameron tells us how determined he is that Britain shall remain a member. But his hope that, if re-elected next year, he can somehow negotiate a new relationship with the EU which he can put to an "In-Out" referendum no later than 2017, is now more pie-in-the-sky than ever. Not only is he told by almost all his continental "colleagues," including Mr Juncker, that such a deal - inevitably requiring a new treaty - is simply not on, but he also shows not the slightest sign of having read the Lisbon Treaty, which lays down such cumbersome procedures for any new treaty that they could not possibly be concluded before his 2017 deadline. The only conceivable way in which, under the rules, Mr Cameron could get the kind of deal he wants is by invoking Article 50 of the treaty. It is this alone that could, first, force the colleagues to negotiate with him, and, secondly, give him what he says he wants: Britain to be free to continue trading with the Single Market as now, without much of its accompanying political baggage. But he can only invoke Article 50 by saying that Britain intends to leave the EU: the very thing he says he cannot contemplate. He is thus fatally impaled on a hook of his own making. It seems he is doomed to remain forlornly returning to Brussels, as isolated as Mr Juncker, with no more than a make-believe game plan that fails to touch reality in any way. Why do metric meddlers keep feeding us lies? Behind the Department for Transport's announcement that hundreds of thousands of signs on Britain's roads showing heights and widths in feet and inches (above) are to be made illegal, to be replaced by their metric equivalents, is a story that was entirely missed. The ruling flatly contradicts the DfT's categorical assurance in a consultation paper last May that there was to be no change "to the units of measurement" used on our traffic signs, and that these were therefore "out of the scope of this consultation." Only at the very end of the DfT's new report on the results does it now reveal that what it said in May was wholly untrue. This took no one aback more than John Gardiner, a former police analyst now running that splendid organisation, the British Weights and Measures Association, who says "the only reason why we didn't respond to the consultation was that we believed the DfT's unequivocal statement that it wasn't intending any change." Whatever one thinks of the virtues of metrication, nothing has been more striking than how consistently successive governments have imposed it over the past 40 years by stealth and outright lies. When the Wilson government in 1965 first slipped out its intention to metricate Britain, by way of a written parliamentary answer at the back of Hansard, it claimed that it was responding to "pressure from industry." But this turned out to be a fraudulent "survey" carried out by a small pro-metric pressure group in the old Federation of British Industry. In 1968, when Tony Benn told MPs that Britain was to be made fully metric by 1975, he twice reassured them that "compulsion is no part of the process." Yet within months came the first of many statutory instruments making continued use of imperial weights and measures a criminal offence. In 1973, the Heath government's metrication White Paper again claimed that the policy rested on "two polls" of industry, which turned out never to have existed. In 1979, after Margaret Thatcher had halted the policy and abolished the Metrication Board, Brussels stepped in with two directives to whip Britain into line. When, in 1995, Michael Heseltine used these to issue a further stack of statutory instruments criminalising the use of imperial measures, he famously said that he was not doing this "at the behest of Europe" - even though he had pushed through his new regulations under "the European Communities Act." By such dishonest means has such a far-reaching change in our national life been brought about without it ever having been put to a vote of the House of Commons. The lies continue to this day.