Cameron and Osborne quietly pay the £1.7BILLION bill from Brussels which they dismissed as 'totally unacceptable'

• Prime Minister said he was 'downright angry' at the demand in October
• Cameron banged lectern and vowed not to 'to get out our cheque book'
• But European Commission says Britain has now 'paid the amount due'

Britain has quietly paid in full a £1.7billion European Union surcharge that David Cameron described as 'appalling'.

The Prime Minister said he was 'downright angry' and said the British public would find the 'vast sum 'totally unacceptable' when the EU revised membership contributions last October.

But the European Commission has revealed that Britain has now 'paid the amount due' with two instalments on 1 July and 1 September.

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David Cameron and George Osborne, pictured in the Commons today, condemned the demand from Brussels last year but Britain has now paid up

The EU made the massive demand after recalculating the income of member states dating back almost 20 years.

After Mr Cameron was told about the surcharge at an EU summit in Brussels, he angrily denounced it as 'not an acceptable sum of money'.

In a lectern-thumping speech, he said: 'We are not going suddenly to get out our cheque book and write a cheque for two billion euros. It is not going to happen.

'You didn't need to have a Cluedo set to know someone has been clubbed with the lead piping in the library.'

The EU agreed to move the deadline for payment from last December to the beginning of this month – after the general election – but it has not reduced the sum.

A fortnight after the bill was revealed, Chancellor George Osborne claimed to have halved it at negotiations in Brussels.

As he emerged from an Ecofin meeting with fellow EU finance ministers he declared Britain would pay just £850 million, telling reporters: 'We have halved the bill ... it's a result for Britain.'

However, a cross-party House of Commons Treasury Committee report published earlier this year found Mr Osborne's claim was 'not supported by the facts'.

British contributions to the EU are subject to a rebate, which means the UK receives a proportion of the amount it pays back a year in arrears.

The rebate was famously won by Margaret That‎cher because a significant proportion of the EU's budget is spent of agricultural subsidies and the UK has a relatively small farming sector.

Treasury officials claimed that Mr Osborne had negotiated that the rebate would apply to the bill, but the Commons report said he would have known this would happen automatically.

The framework set out in official EU documents 'does not appear to leave a great deal of room for uncertainty' that the rebate would 'inevitably' apply, the report said.

'This should have been clear to HM Treasury' as soon as it received the revised figures for gross national income (GNI) which gave rise to the surcharge.

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The chart shows the monstrous bill handed to the UK in October last year by the EU in comparison with other member states

Addressing the House of Commons days after the Ecofin meeting, Mr Osborne said that it was 'not clear' that the rebate would apply to the surcharge to the extent that it did.

But the committee said it found Mr Osborne's argument 'unpersuasive', adding: 'The specific claim to have halved the bill through negotiation is difficult to support.'

Britain was asked to pay more after the EU's statistical body Eurostat reviewed the way it asked member states to calculate the size of their economy.

After the Office for National Statistics provided new figures, which included a revaluation of the size and contribution of the UK's charity sector, the British economy was found to be larger than previously determined.

When the revised numbers from all countries were compiled it was decided Britain had been underpaying towards the EU, while others had paid too much.

France received £801million, while Germany had £614million returned.

Ukip MEP Jonathan Arnott, who is a member of the European Parliament's budget committee, said it was 'unthinkable' that the surcharge had been paid in full.

'For Cameron to label this bill as 'appalling' and 'completely unacceptable' and yet pay it in full shows the sort of politics this man is willing to deal in,' he said.

'It is deceitful, hypocritical and it stinks of the old politics of which people are sick.'

'It truly is a case of the EU saying 'pay up' and Cameron saying 'how much?'