Boris Johnson first entered my consciousness at an excruciating dinner just before the EU’s Maastricht summit in late 1991. It was a revealing little episode in the march of Anglo-European history.

He had come over from Brussels after causing weeks of grief for Downing Street with a volleys of journalistic dynamite. I was writing leaders on Europe at Telegraph HQ.

We were to meet the embattled Prime Minister John Major for peace talks at Brooks’s, the 18th Century Whig club on Pall Mall, and the haunt of then Telegraph editor Max Hastings. The fifth man at the diner à cinq was Charles Moore.

Mr Major - as he then was - aimed to persuade us that he was not going to sign away the pound and lock Britain into a European proto-state. But his pitch was shockingly off colour. He swore profusely in a faux tirade of nationalism, cursing the amiable German Chancellor as “that bastard”.

The Prime Minister would never yield to Johnny Foreigner. He banged the table so hard that the glasses almost crashed to the floor. As we left Boris shook his head in astonishment. “That was a disgraceful spectacle,” he said.

John Major did resist Europe weeks later at Maastricht, “game, set and match” in his tennis parlance. What he did not understand - but a younger Jean-Claude Juncker grasped at once - is that by keeping Britain out of the great federalising project of monetary union he set the long fuse on Brexit.