But there is a much deeper problem than one of time. In a really beautiful cutting from 1997, Oborne and Weaver find Lionel Barber, now the editor of the Financial Times, quoting with approval some words of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then the French finance minister. Strauss-Kahn was attacking Britain for staying out of the euro. “Monetary union,” he said, “is like a marriage… People who are married do not want other people in the bedroom”: poor old Britain would find herself locked out. Subsequent events suggest that Mr Strauss-Kahn’s own bedrooms are rather less exclusive than he implied, but the assumption behind what he said was that the diplomatic marriage of France and Germany would ensure all was well. This turns out to be quite untrue. Diplomacy cannot create a nation, or even a looser political community, such as a United States of Europe. For that, you need the agreement of citizens. Such agreement has never seemed more remote in the history of the European Union than it does today.