Will the person who swapped Dan Hannan for an inferior model please return the original?

Now I am an old friend and supporter of Dan Hannan. One of the most erudite and decent of chaps. So my only explanation for what has been going on for the past few days is that someone has kidnapped him.

Take a look at this...

1. Cameron is genuinely working to deliver a referendum on Lisbon, and may very well succeed;

What by writing begging letters to Vaclav Klaus? Who has told the Tories to frankly sod off.

2. If he’s too late to stop it, it would be silly to have a referendum narrowly on the Lisbon Treaty, in which the best we could hope for would be a return to the status quo ante – in other words, where we are now

Hold on, Dan you know that that isn't the case. The position would be very different. We would in theory be in the same place, but of course we wouldn't. Any Prime Minister turning up at the Council of Ministers in Brussels on the back of a resoundingly negative UK referendum would have, dare I say a strong negotiating position.

3. Far better to push for a wider repatriation of powers from Brussels to Westminster – not just the rights surrendered at Lisbon, but those surrendered at Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice;

This is the dishonest Tory position of promising to do stuff that they know is covered by QMV and will never be offered up for renegotiation, unless Cameron can point to the settled will of the British people

4. Paradoxically, such a demand would be easier for the other member states to grant, since it would involve unilateral British opt-outs rather than a change in the institutional structure for everyone else;

Which paradoxically would be easier after a Lisbon referendum with 70% No vote, but functionally impossible without it.

5. Such a deal should be put to the British people in a referendum;

Which would be bizzare and based on the whim of whatever Cameron and the like felt like at the time, rather than something comprehensible of simple such as the Lisbon/constitutional Treaty. Anything else is just tinkering. And pointless.

6. There are reasons to be hopeful that all this will happen under the next Conservative government;

Do let us in on the secret, or should we just trust you?

7. David Cameron earned the benefit of the doubt when he took Conservative MEPs out of the EPP;

No, he promised and failed to deliver for years., Finally under enormous pressure from the mainstream in his party the Tories left the EPP. A good thing agreed. Now there are two eurosceptic groups in the European Parliamebnt.But that was easy in comparison to what you are suggesting will be done.

8. If we’re wrong about all this, we’ll have the argument then, but there are good reasons to be optimistic

No Dan, not nearly good enough. You want people to trust the Conservative Party with their votes, and you come up with this argument? The election is only a few months ago. The country votes Tory. Cameron renages on his vague promises, we are sold down the river, and then and only then we can have the argument.

Nah, there is no way the real Dan Hannan could have written these words. They must have been written by some ambitious Tory hack politician desperate to make up for embarrassing the leadership.

Update

This is what I mean, this is the video of Dan repeating all this stuff for the daily politics.