Sketch: Boris rails against the 'trivialisation' of the referendum, then engraves some squiggles on sheet metal

The arguments over the EU Referendum are deep and complex, Boris warns, while wearing a hi-viz jacket and defacing some metal with an angle grinder

The Etonian Bane: Boris Johnson brandishes an angle grinder at a steel factory in Dorset. (PA)

On Wednesday night the official, publicly funded, Out campaign threatened to sue ITV for choosing Nigel Farage for their EU Referendum TV debate with David Cameron, instead of coming to them and getting Boris Johnson or Michael Gove instead.

When the brand new Boris Bus rolled into a steel plant in Dorset, Johnson was asked about this by a member of the press. He sighed. “This is the kind of microcosmographia to which the press will try to reduce this thing,” he said. Never use a short word when a long word that doesn’t make sense will do. “They want to reduce this great question to a trivial ‎conversation about personalities.”

Asking, erm, sorry, who exactly is trivialising this issue only risks trivialising the issue further, but it is does have to be mentioned at this point that this pronouncement came around five minutes after Johnson had, for the benefit of the TV cameras, been wearing a hi-viz jacket, boiler suit and protective face mask and had taken an industrial angle grinder to a series of metal sheets spelling out ‘£350,000,000 Per Week.’ (This is the amount of money the Out Campaign are entirely accurate to claim the UK hands over to Brussels each week, and for me to gently point out that the UK Statistics Authority has called this figure ‘misleading’ would only be misleading.)

This, we must presume, was to symbolise brave Boris standing up against such grotesque excesses, and dressing up like a blonde version of Bane from The Dark Knight Rises only added to the drama. That in the end all he succeeded in doing was firing up the machine and scratching one or two of them with some demented squiggles might carry some other message come June 24th. But probably not. For a start, no one will remember this little bit of fun by then. The antics are already being ratcheted up like an innocuous bit of toaster legislation in the hands of an EU judge.

Who’ll care about the metal grinding thing once he’s flown a Spitfire over Brussels and strafed them all with Prawn Cocktail crisps? Who’ll be dragging these pictures out the archives after the TV crews have all been summoned to some fruit and veg market somewhere to watch our next Prime Minister gamely shove a straight banana somewhere it shouldn’t be shoved and then do some epic bants about it all in Latin?

Still, things were better once people had stopped trying to trivialise the issue. We’ve got to leave the EU, he explained, ‘Because they insist we put labels on our smoked salmon saying ‘May Contain Fish.’

An EU wide trade deal with the United States was being ‘blocked by American objections to Greek Feta Cheese’ and ‘French objections to Hollywood movies.’

Whether or not such claims are accurate is sadly not a sketch writer’s job to investigate, but a useful place to start is the fact that it was Boris Johnson who made them.

A recent and equally nontrivial Bojo assertion was that the EU 'bans eight year olds from blowing up balloons', a claim that, while amusing, did mean that public funds had to be invested in a researcher for the Treasury Select Committee to go away and find out that in fact it meant that a risk of suffocation warning on plastic packaging is recommended. It was the same unfortunate soul who also had to investigate another claim, that the EU has 'banned the recycling of teabags', and found that, while true, it done at the request of the British.

Another EU scare story doing the rounds is that the Commission have issued a new directive mandating people who may make things up to wear a sign on their forehead saying ‘MAY MAKE THINGS UP’. Again, don't believe a word of it. Boris Johnson provides the proof.