Just days before unveiling long-awaited proposals for the EU's budget until 2020, the European Commission has published a collection of facts on how Europe is financed, in a move apparently aimed at countering stereotypes conveyed by the Eurosceptic British press that it is over-sized and unaccountable.

As the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent between 1989 and 1994, he invented a self-serving journalistic genre that set a poisonous tone for British EU reporting.