In 1994, Boris Johnson was working as the Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, and in a piece titled ‘Goodbye Brussels’, he made a warning to the EU about the path it was setting for itself. Mr Johnson warned in his article that “sooner or later, rules made in a foreign land will exasperate the British”.

At the time of Mr Johnson’s piece, Sweden, Austria and Finland had joined the bloc, and he argued that they would hand control of key issues to the EU.

He said: “Welcome Australia, Sweden and Finland…no more control of borders, they have been told. No more right to keep out foreign lorries or chalet-buyers.

“…A shared foreign policy, trade policy, environment policy…one could go on.”

Key in the article however, was the now Prime Minister’s prediction that the EU’s approach to forming the union would ultimately push the UK away.

He said: “The fact that decisions are taken in a foreign city will matter increasingly in the imaginations of the British people.

“Some of this may have logic. But unless the architects of the united Europe are aware of their projects’ political limitations, I foresee trouble ahead. “

It may have come 22 years later, but it would appear that the “trouble” the EU would experience would culminate in 2016’s referendum vote.

The former London Mayor has regularly criticised Brussels in his Telegraph column.

In 2012, he lambasted the euro currency’s role in the economic crisis in Greece, slamming the EU while also condemning the eurozone as a “doomsday machine” and a “catastrophe.”

He said: “The euro has turned out to be a doomsday machine, a destroyer of jobs, a killer of growth, because it entrenches and exacerbates the fundamental and historic inability of some countries to compete with Germany in making high-quality goods with low-unit labour costs.”

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He also described a visit he made to Greece, in which he claimed he saw the disastrous consequences of economic imbalance in the bloc first hand.

Mr Johnson continued: “Come with me through the streets of Athens…You will see businesses boarded up and windows smashed because no one has the money or the energy to fix them, and on almost every wall a riot of graffiti full of poisonous hatred for politicians.

“Unemployment is rising by the day, and among young people it now stands at a shameful 54 per cent. Yup, folks – those are the results of an EU plan to produce “growth and jobs.”

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