Currently I am sitting in the cafe at Florence airport, waiting to fly to London with my eldest daughter who will be attending the sixth form at a UK boarding school. Whilst we’re waiting, I am reading up on the latest Brexit shenannigans which isn’t a very good idea. Do I really want my child to go to a country lost in a semi-hysterical state, labouring under what Polly Toynbee rightly calls a “frivolous” Government? A country where a broadsheet publishes uninformed, spiteful trite, like Tim Stanley’s pathetic opinion piece in today’s Telegraph? I guess I do, and that’s half of my problem there: I still love so much about Britain, not least it’s approach to educating the young in a can-do style. Definitely preferable to the Bavarian way which prides itself on the fact that many children are just not cut out to make it in such a hard and unforgiving environment.

Although, come to think about it, a little less can-do would probably not have been a bad thing for young David Davis. His departments risible position papers were so weak that he dismissed one of their most important suggestions (how to tackle goods crossing boarders, especially in Ireland) as “blue-sky” thinking. That’s exactly why Toynbee calls this government frivolous. Their approach to shaping the future of the UK and to mapping a road for its young in this world verges on the criminal. If other leading figures are Mr Johnson of the Foreign Office or ye olde style Jacob Rees-Mogg then, really, Michel Barnier might be forgiven for thinking Britain is taking the mickey in a large way.

Predictably, the Brexit press pounced on Barnier’s observation that he believes Britons should finally be educated about the possible negative consequences of leaving the EU. They needen’t pounce: facts, sadly, play very little role in most Brexit supporters estimation of Britians chances to go colonial again. Case in point is my friend from a few months ago, travelling with me from Munich to London. Let’s call him Colin: Colin lives near Augsburg with his German girlfriend and their newish baby. He claims social security in Germany. He travels freely between the two countries so he van visit his half-Chinese son he fathered a few years ago. He married his mother so she could stay in the UK. However, he doesn’t believe the EU has ever been of benefit to him and he especially objects to EU immigrants scrounging on UK benefits and doesn’t like it when they marry all and sundry from outside the EU, affording them the chance to a life in Blighty. Err, Colin, isn’t that exactly your life? “Yeah, maybe, but that’s different”.

Reason just doesn’t cut it. Which is why the elected representatives in Parliament still need to find it within themselves to save the likes of Colin from their own blinkered blindness and not sell Britain out to the cynics. My daughter, thankfully, has a German passport, too. She won’t be stuck on the island unless she wants to be.