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Do you remember when we exported football hooligans en masse to European cities to abuse their people and their customs?

At certain England games you’ll still see a few dozen of them, but their moronic behaviour is not on the same scale as its 1980s heyday.

To compensate, we’ve found a new breed of disrespectful louts to shame our national image – those 29 MEPs from the Nigel Farage fan club who turned their backs on teenage ­musicians playing Beethoven’s Ode To Joy at the opening of a parliament they were elected to represent us at.

Even though they won’t turn their backs on the £7,599-a-month pay cheque and lavish expenses.

Why don’t they, like Sinn Fein MPs, not draw salaries or attend a ­parliament they refuse to recognise? Why won’t Farage decline his £73,000-a-year EU pension? Why are they gravy-train haters who seem to enjoy sinking pints of Bisto like Sam Allardyce on a chip-shop bender?

Watching these grown men and women act like sulking toddlers crapping their nappies in a cry for attention, it didn’t seem possible to be more embarrassed to be British. Until one of them, reality TV cliche Ann Widdecombe, shrieked in the same place about us being slaves casting off the chains of our undemocratic oppressors .

That’s despite her being democratically elected and her party having a leader chosen only by himself. And she was filmed, on new work iPads, by fellow Brexit MEPs who’d been citing those iPads as a shocking example of EU waste.

Just as they attacked the Strasbourg “pomp and ceremony” as another sign of waste yet burst with pride at the state opening of our parliament which is heralded by golden carriages, crowns and pointless lackeys in ermine.

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They justified turning their backs on Ode To Joy by claiming only nations have anthems and flags. Maybe we should tell our ­footballers to turn their backs on the ball when playing in the UEFA Champions League because it’s got both.

Or instruct our athletes at next year’s Olympics to throw javelins at the IOC flag and boycott the opening ceremony where their anthem has been sung at every Games since 1960.

I mean, how dare those colonising foreigners tell a Brit to respect any other anthem than the one that begs God to save the head of an unelected German family. It’s an outrage.

By the way, I thought those Remain MEPs wearing B*****ks To Brexit shirts in the EU parliament were also demeaning, but at least they weren’t dumping on the doorstep of a club Britain still belongs to. They were being supportive of it. Albeit in a crass, typically Lib Dem way.

And it’s due to the ­arrogance and timidity of the entire political class that Britain has ended up in this pitiful state. With the notion we can be rescued from it by Jeremy Hunt or Boris Johnson (who are both petrified of more Tories doing a Widdecombe) beyond laughable.

It wasn’t long ago that the likes of Johnson told us a deal with the EU would be so easy to achieve they’d be begging us to do one. He was half right.

Right now the words “do one” must be going through the head of every sane European who looks at us.