PMQs - again

After last week's ritual slaughter, Gordon Brown had to do better today. And he sort of did, although that's not saying much. But there are times when Brown tries to think on his feet that he says some really peculiar things. Responding to Cameron's question as to why he won't call a referendum (as if we all didn't know) Brown said something along the lines of:

The [shadow] Foreign Secretary (he didn't actually call him shadow, but surely he must mean Hague...) denied the British people a vote over Maastricht, which was a more important Treaty...

Well, what the hell's he talking about? Maastricht was signed in 1992, and ratified by the British Parliament in 1994. Hague wasn't even a minister at that point - and he only entered the cabinet, at which point one could, I suppose, invoke collective responsibility, in 1995. Brown's trying to get the current Tory front bench on hypocrisy, since there wasn't a referendum on Maastricht. But he's talking absolute nonsense, and he really ought to be better than this.