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In the run-up to the EU summit, France’s vertically challenged president got up on the footstool that makes his height look a bit more, well, presidential and delivered a warning: ‘Never has the risk of a disintegration of Europe been so great.’ In spite of that horrific prospect, ‘Never have so many countries wanted to join Europe.’ That, in the context of the warning, makes those countries sound either stupid or suicidal.

The speech is gibberish on so many levels that it would take a book to comment on all of them. What is particularly mendacious is the trick that so many federasts rely upon: equating Europe with the European Union. Europe can’t disintegrate, Monsieur Sarkozy, though the EUSSR can and, I cordially hope, will. Nor can a country join Europe if God didn’t put it there in the first place, though some may wish to join the EUSSR in the forlorn hope that those trillion-euro handouts will start trickling down again.

Sarko’s locution was no slip of the tongue: many continentals have accused my eurosceptic friends and me of hating Europe. Well, I can’t speak for others, but I love Europe and much prefer it to any other continent (which is why I live there half the time). Moreover, I can almost guarantee that I know — and understand — European history and culture considerably better than Nicky and Angie do, put together, though admittedly this isn’t saying much. Yet I’m not just sceptical about the EU; I despise it and have always done so.

This awful experiment, with millions of people as laboratory rats, was built on lies and is sustained by them. Most of us would be able to see right through the fibs, which is why we are never asked what we think. To save your time and my health, I’ll skip the lies in the middle and just mention the first one and the current one.

The first lie is that the EU was instituted to pursue economic objectives. It wasn’t. The animus was exclusively political from the start, and the objectives weren’t far from those pursued in 1940-1944, when German and French bureaucrats first fell in love with one another. The EU is the child born as a result of that first coupling, with the German father using it to return to political domination, and the French mother to acquire it by hanging on to the father’s coattails.

Economically, the project was doomed from the start, especially since it had to expand beyond the married couple to vindicate itself. The ensuing orgy represented a misguided attempt to override economics with politics. This never works in the long term, and it has only ever worked in the short term when massive violence was used. This the federasts have so far refrained from, at least internally, which is why Europe’s share of the world’s economy has been steadily shrinking for 40 years. Adam Smith’s invisible hand packs a mean punch.

The second, current lie is that ‘a disintegration of Europe’ will have catastrophic consequences. As opposed to what, exactly? It’s not as if doing everything Angie and Nicky desire will mean beer and skittles — or wine and pétanque, if you’d rather. We are all in for a rough ride one way or the other. But for those of us who are constitutionally capable of looking beyond the next election, the gloom doesn’t necessarily mean doom. What would happen to Britain, if our government had the vision and the guts to get out and leave the federasts to clean up their own mess? Yes, the banks would take a hit of 2008 proportions, if not harder. But most of them are already under government control, which means they’ve failed in the free market anyway. It would conceivably take them a year or two longer to nurse themselves back to strength, and we’d all feel the pinch. There would be a recession, that goes without saying, but it would be neither the first nor the last. Somehow, we’ve always come back — and this time we could come back stronger than before. That is, of course, if HMG did what it takes.

A sweeping reform could turn Britain into a tax haven for global investors, who would bring to these shore the billions our sclerotic economy so badly needs. If the Channel Islands or, say, Hong Kong could do it, we can do it better. A series of tax cuts and other incentives could bring manufacturing concerns to Britain, providing employment for millions and reducing the need for the welfare state (not that there is any real need for it anyway, but this is beyond my scope here). In due course we could buy them out, to keep the profits for ourselves. A reform in our ‘education’, at present deliberately designed to turn children into illiterate, unemployable savages with a working knowledge of contraceptives and little else, would create a labour force that firms wouldn’t mind hiring. A huge tax cut across the board would help our domestic economy perk up and hard-working Britons take a breather.

All those things could be done here — and, with variations, on the continent as well. But they won’t be. Not with the Angie-Nicky-Dave show still in town. Therefore we’ll end up having nothing to grin about, and a lot to bear.

Great European catastrophes, such as the French, Russian and Nazi revolutions, have always resulted from weak and incompetent rulers being at the helm when a great storm was brewing. Ours today aren’t just weak and incompetent; they are also self-serving and corrupt. God help us.

 

 

As his article in today’s Times proves, Dave ‘David’ Cameron isn’t the kind of politician who hides behind the smokescreen of obfuscation. He’s more than willing to explain his actions and intentions. Straight from the lip, just as we like it. But who, to use Byron’s phrase, will explain the explanation? Here’s my starter for 10 (no, not years in the slammer, this isn’t Russia yet, so keep your gallows humour to yourself).

Britain, according to Dave, will do anything to protect her national interests, even if this means not repatriating any powers from Brussels, because ‘we benefit greatly from the single market, which we must both safeguard and extend’ and it’s in our national interest to protect our national interests, which in any case is part of Dave’s job description and he cherishes our national identity as a source of strength, no not of Brussels, of Britain you silly thing, so there will be no referendum because there will be no transfer of power to Brussels, which has all the power already, so those sceptics can go boil an egg and let the Greeks eat it while Dave is out there protecting our national interests, especially those of our financial industry that has to be strong enough to make donations to Dave’s party so he can continue to protect our national interests that are coextensive with his own, so if the new treaty only has 17 signatories, and not 27, which really would be in our national interests, then there will be no referendum because Dave would not have signed anything new, and even if he did there would be no referendum anyhow because this would run contrary to our national interests, as defined by Dave, whose job it is to protect them by ‘bold structural reform programmes’ and ‘closer fiscal coordination’, provided they are in our national interests.

There, what could possibly be any clearer? If you want any specifics, you must look for them not in the text, but in the sub-text. The only issue Dave is prepared to stand firm on is the so-called Tobin tax on all financial transactions, which would effectively relocate Europe’s financial centre from London to Frankfurt, lowering Britain onto the perch currently occupied by Greece. And you know what? I’m sure Angie and Nicky will go along with this, chuckling between themselves at their own cleverness behind Dave’s back. You see, protecting the City of London from this egregious assault involves no repatriation of powers from Brussels. The Tobin tax isn’t in effect yet. It was only proposed by the European Commission on 28 September this year, and — call me a conspiracy theorist and kick me all the way to Brussels — one suspects specifically for the purpose of enabling Dave to save face by pretending he can protect Britain’s interests. To Angie and Nicky the Tobin tax is what a pawn sacrifice is to a chess master. The intent isn’t to give anything away. It’s to win the game.

While columnists are debating the interesting but moot point of where exactly Dave’s heart is (the universal assumption is that he has one), he finds himself in agreement with Ken ‘Kenneth’ Clarke, the Tory who entered into his own coalition with the LibDems 20 years ago. We aren’t going to repatriate any powers from Brussels at this point, says Ken, because trying to do so would prevent us from focusing on ‘how to maintain the financial stability of the western world.’ By inference, letting Angie and Nicky, proudly assisted by Dave, to ride roughshod over Britain equals pan-western stability. That argument wouldn’t survive 10 seconds of intelligent discussion, but a realist would never invite Ken ‘Kenneth’ to take part in one. People must never be taken out of their depth.

A word of avuncular advice to Dave: get yourself better writers, mate. That way you wouldn’t have to put your name to the kind of drivel that enables the likes of me to poke scurrilous fun. Really, waffle must be written so that no one guesses that’s what it is. It’s all in the wrist.

Polling stations were set up all over the world for Russian citizens who choose to reside elsewhere. In London, there are almost 300,000 of them, and I don’t know a single one. It’s not that I’m prejudiced against my former compatriots; in fact, I have Russian friends all over the world, in LA, New York, Houston, Paris, Amsterdam, Auxerre. But not in London. My first sightings of New Russians arriving at these shores made me shun all venues where this vacuum in my social life could be filled. This was mostly an intuitive response; I couldn’t justify it in any rational way. Now I can.

Putin’s United Russia ended up third in London, not first as it did in its native habitat. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the parties that finished above alpha dog’s gang were the communists and the ultra-nationalists. On the other hand, the Russians living in the USA and Germany solidly voted for the liberals who didn’t finish in the medals elsewhere.

I can offer an explanation based on personal observations over many years. In any large Russian community abroad there are those who are integrated into the ambient life, and those who cling to the old ways. The former overwhelmingly go along with the dominant ethos. Thus such Russians in Texas are staunchly conservative Republican voters, while in New York they are predominantly leftwing Democrats. In New York the watershed ran along the language barrier: fluent speakers of English believed everything they read in The New York Times, while those whose English was poor to nonexistent (the majority) believed that political debates are best settled with large-calibre firearms.

Overhearing Russians in the streets of London, one gets the impression that it’s the other way around. Most of those living here can speak English, but they haven’t absorbed the values that tend to be expressed in that language. An outpouring of antediluvian Russian chauvinism, laced with anti-Semitism is ever-present. Sometimes it’s irritating, at other times funny, such as the other day, when a middle-aged Russian woman, constantly jumping between the two languages, told her companion, ‘He’s a Jew in the worst sense of the word.’ I fought hard not to laugh at the way she put it, and not to cry at the sentiment.

Now the London Russians have voted for the Russian parties that hark back to Comrades Lenin, Stalin and, presumably, Hitler. Something for the Home Office to consider, methinks.

That Lord Lester, QC, should love Strasbourg justice is par for the course: he is a LibDem peer after all, and party loyalty has been known to dim the judgment of better men than him. What is deeply worrying is that he seems to be ignorant of the basics of constitutional law. Oh, I’m sure he’s capable of giving you the chapter and verse of Clause X in Article Y, Part Z. What I mean by the basics is understanding what a constitution is, how it comes into being, how it develops historically. You know, the kind of things school children used to learn 100 years ago before they knew what contraceptives were for.

‘Before the Human Rights Act,’ Lord Lester writes in today’s Times, ‘there were insufficient legal remedies in Britain — a country without a written constitution — for breaches of our basic rights.’ Actually, Sir, not having a written constitution is a sign of legal strength, not weakness. It proves that, unlike, say, the USA, France, Germany or Israel, England isn’t a political or ideological contrivance but a nation that has developed organically over centuries. In such lands constitutions are written not on sheets of paper but in the hearts of the people. If they are indeed written there, a unifying document will be redundant. If they aren’t, it’ll be useless. A written constitution is like a prenuptial agreement stipulating the frequence of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother.

The way ‘our basic rights’ have been protected for over a millennium stacks up rather well against the record of either Germany or France. Since 1688, when the English constitution adopted its modern shape, France has been ruled by several variously carnivorous monarchies (constitutional or otherwise), an ad hoc revolutionary committee, a Directory, a military dictatorship, an emperor, five different republics and, from 1940 to 1944, by the Nazis, first de facto and then de jure. And Germany… well, we all know about her. Throughout that time, England’s legal system, her sage, moderate and balanced constitution, was the envy of the world, including such architects of the Enlightenment as Montesquieu.

Edmund Burke, one of the greatest constitutional minds ever, unerringly identified the three pillars on which our constitution rests: prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind. Signposting the organic development of England’s constitution have indeed been written documents, such as Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of Rights (that inspired a similar American addendum to their constitution), the Act of Settlement — well, this isn’t the place to get into the minutae of constitutional history. This is a place, however, to suggest that, should any constitutional problems arise here, England would be better placed to solve them than Lester’s continental friends.

It is a fact that all our post-war governments, regardless of their party affiliation, have done their best to undermine the best constitution the world has ever known. Inspired by Lester’s clones, they’ve exploded TNT charges under the double-jeopardy law, the right not to give self-incriminating evidence and many others. They’ve also destroyed the constitutional balance to the dictatorship of the Commons traditionally provided by an unelected, hereditary House of Lords. Its resulting impotence is best exemplified by the presence of the likes of Lord Lester in its chambers.

The honourable gentleman is campaigning, somewhat hysterically, for allowing the European Court of Human Rights, that fly-by-night concoction, to override the very nature of Britains’s realm (he’s particularly keen on giving the vote to convicted felons, something that has been wisely withheld since 1870.) He is also proud of being a member of the Commission on a Bill of Rights. But we already have one, your Lordship. It was passed in 1689 by the very parliament you wish to turn into a travesty. And, just for decorum’s sake, Britain doesn’t have ‘citizens’. She has subjects of Her Majesty the Queen. I could recommend a short reading list for Lord Lester to grasp the intricacies of the British realm. But I won’t. He won’t understand.

 

Having manhandled each other in clinches over a few months, Merkel and Sarkozy have now gone beyond the foreplay stage. And it’s we who are on the receiving end.

According to the newlyweds, the agreement they struck in the last few hours introduces structural changes that ‘go beyond agreements’. Allow me to translate: never mind the prenup, it’s how we feel about each other that counts. Yes, but agreements are, well, legal. And legality matters, Napoleonic code and all that, to say nothing of British laws and those of the few other countries that still observe them for old times’ sake. There is the rub: all the meaningful legal barriers in the way of the happy couple have been demolished. So they’ve just told us what they are going to do:

To begin with, the new EU treaty, which is the greatest part of the trousseau, will now only need the quorum of the 17 eurozone countries, not the wider circle of 27 friends. Ideally, it ought to be all 27, say Angie and Nicky, but at a pinch the wedding party could be smaller. And from then on no single guest will be able to stop the proceedings by showing ‘just cause’. No veto powers — all Angie and Nicky will need to pass any new reform is an 85% majority, and the remaining 15% can just grin and bear it — sorry, ‘hereafter forever hold their peace’.

The message to Britain is clear and boy is it loud: if you want to be invited to the wedding, promise to behave. If you don’t, we can jolly well go ahead without you, see if we care.

This is the main thrust of the joint announcement, even if the bride and groom may deny that it is. The details are to be worked out later, ushers’ uniforms, bridesmaids’ dresses, rings, that sort of thing. In broad strokes, all the members will have to put a ceiling on their deficits, 3% of GDP. Go beyond that, and you’ll be slapped down with automatic penalties, not that Angie and Nicky want to tell you how to run your country. How even such low deficits will serve the purpose of reducing debts is unclear, but then I told you it’s just a detail. The ECB won’t become the lender of last resort, and there will be no eurobonds; the guests will have to pay their own way. Or rather they’ll use the US Federal Reserve in the last-resort capacity, what with its generous offer to pay for the wedding with an endless supply of cheap dollars. The dollars will be indeed about as cheap as the paper they’ll be printed on, but that’s one for the future.

As Angie and Nicky are about to swap paroxysms on the nuptial EU bed, and the servants are finishing off the stale bubbly left in the glasses, Britain shivers outside, her nose to the window. The temptation to toss a brick through the glass, screaming ‘plague on both your houses’ is strong, but the safe bet is that our powers that be will resist it. After all, who’d want to spoil such an auspicious occasion for the happy couple? Our PM has already said there would be no referendum, and you know why: He knows this marriage from hell has been made in heaven. Even if the rest of us don’t.

 

 

 

 

Col. Putin, aptly described as ‘alpha dog’ by the smitten Mrs Clinton, has won his Duma elections — square, if not necessarily fair. In his day Comrade Stalin, the alpha dog’s role model, sagely grasped the essence of elections, and he didn’t mind sharing his wisdom with posterity. ‘What matters,’ he taught (Comrade Stalin always ‘taught’, he never just spoke), ‘isn’t how the votes are cast. It’s how they are counted.’ He then proceeded to prove his point by routinely scoring 105% in local elections.

Western and Russian observers have commented on all sorts of irregularities in yesterday’s elections, in which the alpha dog’s party polled about 50% of the vote, down from 64.3% last time, but enough for a landslide. The repertoire of the ‘irregularities’ was reassuringly broad: homeless people in Moscow bribed to stuff stacks of ballot papers into the boxes, old ladies threatened into signing piles of absentee ballots, the opposition’s messages kept out of all the broadcast media, local mayors and governors confidently predicting famines if any other party got in, coachloads of voters floating from one polling station to another — you name it. You might say that the alpha dog has learned some of his bag of tricks from the more mature democracies, such as Mayor Daley’s Chicago and other US political machines. But that would be missing the point, even though some of the ‘irregularities’ did swing Illinois Kennedy’s way in 1960. And Lyndon Johnson (nicknamed ‘landslide Lyndon’ after winning his first congressional election by a couple of dozen votes) did rely on the votes of Texans long since dead.

But compared to the ultimate stratagem all such chicanery is child’s play and, in Russia’s instance, no more than the icing on the cake. No doubt the alpha dog’s party did resort to some of those tricks, but this was just for insurance. It would have won anyway. For the Russian spivs have learned from ours the only lesson that really counts: if you want to guarantee victory, make sure the voters have no viable alternative.

The lesson was learned and inwardly digested. The nearest rival to United Russia polled just 19% of the vote, which is worryingly high, considering it’s the somewhat compromised Communist party. The liberal opposition languished at half that percentage, which isn’t surprising, since it’s politically inept and intellectually puny. As ‘none of the above’ wasn’t an option on offer, the result was in the bag before the first 10 votes were cast by the same person.

Do you detect similarities? Look at Germany, whose people clearly don’t want to use their hard-earned to support those foreigners who don’t earn anything hard. So what recourse do they have? Punishing the ruling coalition at the polls isn’t going to change anything because there isn’t a single mainstream party in Germany that campaigns on a drastically different platform. They could of course cast protest votes, but even assuming illogically that they’d all end up in the basket of the same party, the people would get a different government but not different policies. Or look at the USA, where the few parties (or Republican candidates) that offered a substantive alternative to Obama had been forced out before the election kicked off in earnest. Or, closer to home, look at us. Suppose you feel about the EU the same way I do, which is to say the same way a tree feels about dogs, and for the same reason. Which party would you vote for to make your views count? Again, you could follow the example of many of my friends and opt for the UKIP. But such an action, though immensely satisfying aesthetically, would be an exercise in futility — unless you seriously expect the UKIP to form the next cabinet.

British voters are thus offered a distinction without a difference. All the candidates we vote for will be drawn from the same spivocratic pool, even if the colour of their lapel decorations may be different. In every meaningful sense we have become a single-party state, just like Russia. It is in this sense that the alpha dog learned his bogus democracy from us. All we have to do now is learn from him how to count votes and coerce voters. Then we can become a single-party state de jure, not just de facto.

 

 

Please don’t tell anybody, but — is anyone listening? — for once I found myself in agreement with Mr Delors. Moreover, he said something that made me jump up, punch air and scream, ‘Yes!’ What caused this uncharacteristically effusive reaction was his admission that the euro was a non-starter from the word ‘allez’, or something to that effect. Moreover, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ were right all along when arguing that, without a fiscal union (that means a single European state, in English), a monetary union couldn’t possibly succeed. At that point, my enthusiasm began to dampen. You see, over 11 years of part-time living in France I’ve learned that, when a continental and especially a Frenchman refers to the British as ‘Anglo-Saxons’, he’s no friend of ours (the implication is that les rosbifs and les yanquees are cut from the same unsophisticated cloth).

That got my antennae twitching, so I couldn’t possibly miss the rest of the message. The conclusion, continued Delors, is that we all should have listened to him and joined together in one glorious Germany-dominated EUSSR from the start. In other words, the thinking behind the project, his own thinking to be exact, was flawless. Shame about the execution.

Now where have I heard this before? Let me see… oh, yes, a couple of weeks ago when a young journalist writing for a London paper told me that Marxism was a great idea, but it was perverted by the Soviets. Now, in the hope that the youngster will learn something (Delors never will), allow me to share a few home truths.

The problems with any giant socialist project, be that the USSR, the EUSSR, our sainted NHS and comprehensive education, or Sweden’s welfare state, are always systemic, not symptomatic. All such projects fail not because they are badly executed, but because they are erected on the subsidence-prone, termite-eaten foundations of a wrong moral, philosophical (and therefore metaphysical) idea. It’s not a good thing done badly, but an awful thing done badly.

In this instance, the monstrous idea of a giant, supranational European state runs against the very nature of Western statehood. Our states historically derive their legitimacy either from divine right or from public consent or, ideally, both. Now, unless Messrs Delors, Clarke and the whole LibDem party believe that the EUSSR is divinely ordained, they have to presume that their abortion of a state would enjoy pan-European consent of the governed. It wouldn’t. Such a state might, for a while, be more sound economically than the EUSSR is now, but in any case it wouldn’t be economics that would bring it down. It would be the pride of each of the 27 members (or however many the federasts would be able to coerce or bribe in), their sense of national identity, their all-too-human resentment at being told what to do by foreigners, especially those they don’t like very much. It would be their love of home, as they and their ancestors have known it from time immemorial. The EUSSR of Jacques Delors’s dream wouldn’t be suffocated by tight money supply. It would be drowned in blood.

The fault lies not with the mechanics but with the designers. It’s yours, Delors.

We all despise conspiracy theories. Most of us like to read about them, for fun, but we know there isn’t a shred of truth in any of that stuff. And even if there had been any real conspiracies in history, they never achieved their ghastly ends. Take bolshevism, for example. It had a good innings for 70-odd years. But where is it now? What?!? In Cannes, floating along in 300-foot yachts? You’re a conspiracy theorist. Off with your head. Repeat after me: bolshevism ended in 1991. The original conspiracy is no more. OK, that’s better.

Or look at the Frankfurt School, all those Marcuses and Adornos who fused Marx with Freud to undermine the free world. Their madcap idea was not to overturn Western institutions by force but to infiltrate them the better to destroy them from the inside. How crazy can one get? Just consider some of their stated aims:

1. The creation of racism offences.
2. Continual change to create confusion
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking
7. Emptying of churches
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits
10. Control and dumbing down of media
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family

Now who in his right mind would think that any of this could have possibly succeeded? Only those deranged conspiracy theorists. So glad you and I aren’t among them.

 

 

Inflation is awful for what it is in theory. For what it does to people in practice. And for what it reflects. So forgive me if I say a few things everyone knows. As sometimes we forget what we know (I’m the first culprit myself), the following is just to jog your memory.

Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. In the West, the amount of available goods mostly depends on private economic activity. The amount of money chasing them mostly depends on how much currency rolls off the printing presses controlled by the government or, more typically these days, by the quasi-independent central banks to which governments like to delegate this function. As the government can control production only indirectly, inflation is caused by governments printing (or borrowing, which amounts to the same thing) too much money. Why would any government want to print too much money? Because it wants to spend too much. And why would it want to do a silly thing like that? Because this enables it to reshape society in its own image, that of corrupt, selfish, ignorant materialists.

In his book The Time of Turbulence, the self-admittedly infallible Alan Greenspan, who operated the American printing press from 1987 to 2006, confirms the first half of this homespun wisdom: ‘Excess government spending causes inflation.’ The second half is proved by numbers.

Western governments began to pursue aggressive economic activism in the 20th century. Whether the subsequent violent death of the best part of half a billion people was a direct result of this development or its unfortunate side effect is outside my immediate subject. I just want to compare the inflation figures in the last sane century, the 19th, with the 20th, the first ‘American century’ (it was described as such by the publisher Henry Luce).

Behold: £100 pounds in 1850 became £110 pounds in 1900 — a negligible inflation of 10% over 50 years. That meant that a baby born at the time with a silver spoon in his mouth, which utensil equalled, say, a solid middle-class income of £500 a year, could live his whole life in reasonable comfort even if he never made a penny of his own. Conversely, £100 in 1950 became £2000 in 2000 — a wealth-busting, soul-destroying inflation of 2,000%. This brought the economy to the forefront of human endeavour: with money losing value at that rate, people had to devote every waking moment to chasing pennies wherever they could find them. They also realised that saving and conservative long-term investment would lead them straight into the gutter. Saving became ruinous; borrowing, logical. Why not borrow £100,000 if you know that in a few years its real value would drop by an order of magnitude? And, for the same reason, why save £100,000? Thus the hysterical, feverish, soulless materialism of modernity isn’t just a consequence of original sin. It’s a result of systematic government policy.

The knock-on effect pushed the banks into irresponsible lending, the people into promiscuous borrowing and reckless spending, and the economy to the edge of the precipice. Such is the awful cost of social engineering, of governments trying to satisfy their totalitarian aspirations by economic subterfuge. Do think of that the next time you kneel before the altar of the blessed welfare state, the sainted NHS or the humanitarian foreign aid. If you do, I bet you’ll get up on your feet straight away.

 

Alain Juppé, the French foreign minister, believes that the crisis in Europe is existential. Like the writings of Sartre and Camus? No, more like 1940, the year in which the French, in anticipation of the Stockholm syndrome, fell in love with their conquerors. Like a pre-war girl from a good family, la belle France first put up some token resistance, then surrendered, then began to cohabit with her rapist only to marry him in the end and live happily ever after.

At least the ‘happily’ part was the plan. But Mr Juppé isn’t happy any longer. Things have gone sour, like a corked bottle of Meursault. The current crisis ‘raises the spectre of a return to violent conflict on our continent… [undoing] what we have created… since the foundation of the European community.’ The solution? How do we get out of the hole into which we’ve dug ourselves? Clearly unfamiliar with the Anglo-Saxon idiom, Mr Juppé thinks we should keep digging. ‘We’ve gone too far not to go further.’ Who could argue with this logic?

This is in line with the thinking of my many French friends who come up with highly creative arguments in favour of the EU. ‘It’s thanks to the EU,’ said one, ‘that Europe has been at peace since the war.’ Ignoring the obvious fact that the war ended in 1945 and the EU has only existed for 20 years, I simply replied that it’s colour TV that’s the real factor of peace. ‘What does colour TV have to do with it?’ ‘About as much as the EU.’

When, in response to a similar argument, I suggested to another chap, at that time a high official in the Commission, that most federations in history, from the USA to Yugoslavia to the USSR, ended up with the constituent parts murdering one another, he gave me that clichéed Gallic shrug. ‘Comparaison n’est par raison,’ he said (a comparison isn’t an argument), thereby refuting the opposite view first put forth by Aristotle.

One would think that the man responsible for the conduct of French foreign policy at this fraught time would have a clearer sense of history. Or at least one would have thought this in the past, before Europe fell into the hands of amoral, self-serving spivs. And, in addition to those qualities, the bureaucrats from the two principal powers, Germany and France, also suffer from all sorts of delusions. The Germans don’t want to be German any longer, but the French do. Though the Germans, overcome with Auschwitz guilt, hate themselves, they want everyone to be just like them. The French, though still sometimes talking about les sales boches over a glass of rouge, are ready to go along. Bringing up history seems futile in this asylum run by the lunatics. But, since I’m not due back in France until Christmas, some of the more obvious parallels have to be drawn.

When Prussia got a shot of energy after first having been kicked from pillar to post by Napoleon but then ending up on the winning side, she decided to bring all the German principalities together. To that end in 1818 she created Zollverein, a customs and eventually currency union of all Hohenzollern bailiwicks. The principalities who feared, correctly, that this would lead to Prussian domination were bribed with subsidies and cheap loans (follow the parallels?). Soon other German or at least Germanic states were drawn in. By 1866 most of them had been brought to heel. When Austria proved too stubborn, she was attacked, but managed to hold her own. Two years later another holdout, Schleswig-Holstein, wasn’t so lucky.

In 1870 Prussia led her North German Federation and several southern German states in a victorious attack on France. A year later the First Reich, now including the formerly French Alsace-Lorraine, finally came together under Prussia’s aegis. We all know what happened over the next 70-odd years.

The EU has been pieced together on a larger scale but using the same strategic blueprint. First you stuff them full of carrots, then, should anyone throw up, beat them down with the stick. Seeing that the carrots are coming up in a geyser, the stick may well see the light of day in the near future. But, contrary to Juppé’s lament, this wouldn’t be the undoing of ‘everything the EU has created’. It’ll be the natural result.

Alas, if there is something for which no historical parallel can be drawn, it’s Britain’s role in the madhouse proceedings. She isn’t the doctor any longer. She’s one of the inmates.