Mr Jurgiel’s vision was popular in the staunchly Catholic countryside, where thousands of small-scale farmers are still growing crops on medieval-style strips of land (subsidised by EU grants, of course). But young urbanites were appalled by his party’s top-down illiberalism. To them, the EU was their only guarantor of basic democratic rights. They soon took to the streets in their thousands, waving EU flags.

The idea is bizarre in Britain, whose history can be seen as one long tale of fending off continental interference while establishing our own, gradually democratising institutions. The nation, for us, is the guarantor of rights. For many young Poles, as for many Spaniards, Italians, French and Germans, whose countries have lived under national fascist rule, it is the EU that stands for rule of law and democracy.

Brussels and Britain were never prepared to recognise and respect one another’s historic differences. But now, we are contending with the ultimate insult: the idea that our courts, famed the world over for their integrity, cannot be relied upon to protect the rights of our resident EU citizens and must be superseded by EU courts even after Brexit. This might sound reasonable to a Pole. To a Briton, an inheritor of rights guaranteed by the nation and stretching back hundreds of years, it simply sounds insane.