No subject makes fools of politicians so well as Europe. It is the question on which, for six decades, first the Labour Party, then the Conservative Party and now Labour again have been fatally split. On Wednesday, in an overwrought debate in parliament on the right to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, MPs strained for historic significance, quoting Edmund Burke on their own job definition and trying to sound as if this was 1940 once again. In fact it was a procedural motion in which the question was: where should power lie? And Jeremy Corbyn had the answer exactly right.

The reason it is called Article 50 is that this is the precise number of comment pieces every citizen of this country is