Languishing somewhere in UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s pile of inherited policies is his predecessor’s plan to make us love the European Union by not using highly contentious and unpleasant expressions such as…European Union.

Banning this and other blood-curdling words and phrases from the UK political lexicon is seen as a way of calming the troubled British breast and restoring confidence in something we are urged to find softer, more cuddly words to describe.

The idea was put forward last year as Tony Blair plotted a wholesale rebranding of the you-know-what in the hope of winning support for a revival of the constitution. And if you think he must have lost his marbles and that his departure from Downing Street was probably timely, please note that the first thing agreed at Mr Blair’s last EU summit was a ban on the word constitution to describe the revived c*nst*t*ti*n.

But the UK plan goes further. In future, said a memo to civil servants, there will be no place in print or speech for any horrid, nasty words that make people scream and hide behind the sofa, such as ‘Eurocrat’, ‘EU directive’ or, worst of all, ‘Brussels’.

In future ministers and officials should refrain from using this vexatious nomenclature which gives Europe such a bad name. They should also avoid mentioning, publicly at least, the European Commission, the euro, the Common Agricultural Policy and, while we’re at it, the Common Fisheries Policy, majority voting, budget rebates and Poland.

Also best avoided are any references to E* institutions, any kind of *U legislation, and anyone whose name links them to the **, such as the wicked Jacques Delors, former president of the European C********n, who clashed so bruisingly on so many occasions with M*rg*re* Th*tch*r, whose name is not amongst the proposed banned phrases in the Blair memo but which has been partially obscured here just to be on the safe side.

Some of the above is set out in a document whose very title is stripped of any of the potentially explosive words linked to what current C********* President José Manuel Barroso has started calling the “non-imperial empire” to get around the proposed ban.

There are, however, few signs that Mr Brown intends to adopt the plan: he himself has openly mentioned the European ***** more than once since taking office, albeit in a bit of a sneery way. His new Foreign Secretary David Miliband, travelled to Br****** soon after his appointment and was also heard to refer to the ** without batting an eyelid.

So what is the status of the plan? Is it being activated? To learn the truth, Euroville made approaches to senior figures in Whitehall and Westminster. After several rebuffs, a source who did not want to be named said he had been authorised to give this magazine an exclusive statement clarifying the situation.

Here it is in full: “An initial assessment has been made of the impact of the E******* U**** on UK citizens. It is......