Author: Richard North File Type: epub Now published with a new preface explaining why The Great Deception is of the utmost importance today as it was when it was first published and to coincide with Great Britains EU referendum in 2016, this book suggests that the United States of Europe and its edict of ever closer union have been based on a colossal confidence trick. The Great Deception tells for the first time the inside story of the most audacious political project of modern times the plan to unite Europe under a single supranational government. From the 1920s, when the blueprint for the European Union was first conceived by a British civil servant, this meticulously documented account takes the story right up to the moves to give Europe a political constitution, already planned 60 years ago to be the crowning dream of the whole project. The book shows how the gradual assembling of a European government has amounted to a slow motion coup detat, based on a strategy of deliberate deception, into which Britains leaders, Macmillan and Heath, were consciously drawn. Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, scarcely an episode of the story does not emerge in startling new light, from the real reasons why de Gaulle kept Britain out in the 1960s to the fall of Mrs Thatcher. The book chillingly shows how Britains politicians, not least Tony Blair, were consistently outplayed in a game the rules of which they never understood. But it ends by asking whether, from the euro to enlargement, the project has now overreached itself, as a gamble doomed to fail. Since their collaboration began in 1992, Christopher Booker, a Sunday Telegraph columnist, and Richard North, who worked for four years in Brussels and Strasbourg as a senior researcher, have won a unique reputation for their expertise on Britains relationship to the European Union. Their previous publications included The Mad Officials (1994) and The Castle of Lies (1996). But they regard The Great Deception as the book they had been waiting to write for ten years. Christopher Bookers preface now adds up-to-date detail for the current era as Britain heads inexorably towards a possible Brexit.**ReviewTwo brave and diligent men, Christopher Booker and Richard North, have written a superb history of the EU and of Britains relationship with it... Every MP, every senior civil servant, every journalist with any claim to understanding the current state of the country, should read it.... Besiege booksellers. Ask any politician or commentator who pronounces on this subject if they have read it. If they havent, they dont know what theyre talking about. Peter Hitchens, The Mail on Sunday About the Author Christopher Booker is a weekly columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. The author of The Mad Officials and The Neophiliacs, he founded Private Eye with Paul Foot and others. Richard North is an Economist and a Consultant to the Government on European issues.