Each week before June 23, I would like to nominate a ridiculous comment of the week. With the amount of folk around claiming that Britain’s exit from the EU would herald World War III, pestilence, famine and every other horseman of the apocalypse, there is no shortage of candidates.

At the beginning of last week I rather assumed that David Cameron would win for attempting to posthumously recruit the British dead of Two World Wars to the cause of the EU, claiming that the fallen had laid down their lives solely in order that Britain should not to be sovereign. But then the PM’s predecessor, Gordon Brown, stepped up in the middle of the week and pronounced that voting to ‘Leave’ the EU would be ‘not British’.

Some years ago I contributed to a pretty bad book put together by Gordon Brown that tried to define ‘Britishness’. So I know how elastic an idea he thinks it is. But even I found it surprising that Brown could claim that people who want Britain to govern herself are un-British while those who want Britain to be ruled from abroad are patriots. In any ordinary political season Gordon Brown would have won last week’s race. But this is no ordinary political season, for we must remember that Frau Merkel is still around. And so it is that at the very end of this week the German Chancellor has stepped up and won my ridiculous comment of the week award. It is for an intervention reported in today’s Sunday Times in which the German Chancellor describes the prospect of Britain exiting the EU as a ‘completely unnecessary risk’ which risks creating ‘extra instability’ in Europe at a time (as the ST says) ‘when it is already facing economic turmoil and the migration crisis.’

I suppose we will simply have to guess why Chancellor Merkel is trying to blame the British public for ‘worsening’ a situation she herself created. After all, if Frau Merkel had not last year unilaterally thrown open the doors of Europe to the entire third world then the migration crisis would not be a crisis. Was it a ‘necessary' or an 'unnecessary' risk that the German Chancellor took in 2015? In my view last year she sailed Europe directly into an iceberg. How strange that she should now attack those passengers who are trying to secure themselves a life raft.