Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the European Commission, showed his hand when he was the finance minister of Luxembourg

I had sensed this parting of the ways coming sixteen years previously in an encounter at a European summit — not with some obscure Brussels minion but with the man who would go on to become the President of the European Commission by the time Britain finally voted to leave.

I first met Jean-Claude Juncker — the man the UK tabloids dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe” — back when he was the humble finance minister of Luxembourg, although, given their constitution, it also made him that country’s less than humble prime minister.

We were in a small meeting room in Portugal in the summer of 2000, as the battle over Germany’s proposal to introduce an EU-wide savings tax was reaching its climax. In