On Wednesday, MEPs held a Two Minutes Hate against Britain. It wasn’t called that, obviously. Its official title was “The UK’s Withdrawal from the EU (debate)”. But it resembled the “hideous ecstasy of vindictiveness” described by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four far more than it resembled a parliamentary debate.

Journalists focused on the relatively restrained assertions by Michel Barnier, Jean-Claude Juncker and the other bigwigs that the backstop was non-negotiable and Britain should do as it was told. But the rank-and-file MEPs who spoke afterwards felt less need to be diplomatic. Guy Verhofstadt, the Liberal leader, warned us, “you gonna pay the price!” So bellicose was his tone that even the arch-Europhile Edwina Currie was prompted to respond, “Honestly, Guy, we British don’t like being told what to do. And shouting at us makes it worse.”

Elmar Brok, a German Christian Democrat who blows aggressively through his moustache when he talks, and who is currently embroiled in allegations about profiteering from EU-funded constituency visits, dispensed with any niceties:

“The European market is fourteen times larger than the British. Companies will move away. Anyone who produces for the European market will leave Britain. It’s going to be bitter for the UK – bad for us, but bitter for you!”

MEPs cheered rapturously. That’s what happens during the Two Minutes Hate. Individually, many MEPs are polite and reasonable. But get them together for a virtue-signalling rally and they vie to outdo each other with harder and harder language.

And that, in a nutshell, is the dynamic driving Eurocrats towards no deal. There is no logic in their position. If the choice is between, on the one hand, no backstop but everything else agreed and, on the other, no backstop and nothing else either, there is only one rational option. As Detlef Seif, the Brexit rapporteur for Mr Brok’s party in the German Bundestag puts it, “If the EU now sticks to the proposed backstop without offering any compromises, this will cause the outcome that all sides most want to avoid”.