We make at least one fatal mistake in dealing with our beloved friends and partners in the European Union. And that is that we persist in the delusion that they do not really mean what they say.

Every so often the hierarchs of Brussels publish a manifesto or programme, sketching out the route map to further integration. They set out their ambition in black and white – to create a monetary union, a political union, a social union: in essence, to take a load of disparate countries and to try to fuse them into one, with common citizenship and loyalty to a “European” idea.

Oh come off it, we say. It’ll never happen – it’s just the usual old windy Euro-rhetoric. I well remember how we reacted to the news that they wanted to create the euro – with a sort of benign incredulity. I have just re-read former Prime Minister Sir John Major’s famous article in The Economist, in 1993, in which he poured scorn on the very text of the Maastricht Treaty: “I hope my fellow heads of state and government will resist the temptation to recite the mantra of full economic and monetary union. If they do recite it, it will have all the quaintness of a rain dance, and about as much potency … The plain fact is that economic and monetary union is not realisable in the present circumstances.”