The undemocratic foundation of the EU risks corrupting representative government in Europe. As Delaume and Cayla recall, in 2008, three years after the French rejection of the Constitutional Treaty, more than three-quarters of French parliamentarians approved the Lisbon Treaty. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing candidly admitted at the time that Lisbon was essentially the same thing as the Constitutional Treaty. It is difficult to imagine, Delaume and Cayla point out, “representatives more disconnected from those they are meant to represent than these ones”. Delaume and Cayla correctly predicted that British MPs would not repeat the error of their French counterparts. Indeed, the Commons vote on Article 50 was almost a perfect mirror image of the French vote of 2008: more than three-quarters of MPs voted to uphold the will of the people rather than to overturn it.

The euro may have been the final straw for the EU. It increased the power of the technocrats, and exposed the impotence of national democratic governments. It even turned the EU against one of the central — possibly the central — raison d’être of the European project: the containment of Germany. Remember how it all began: the European Coal and Steel Community, established in 1951, was designed to place those strategic resources outside exclusive German control. The euro has, however, steadily amplified German power in Europe over the last two decades, in some ways in spite of Germany’s economic performance rather than because of it (British GDP was less than half German GDP in 1995; it is more than 80 per cent now). Far from being contained, Germany now exerts disproportionate influence over the fiscal, monetary and immigration policy of the rest of Europe. As Sir Craig Oliver’s account of the Cameron negotiations reveals, it was to Merkel that the British government would normally turn to find out if a particular proposal would be met with a Ja or a Nein.

That the euro would strengthen Germany should have been clear from the outset. It was to Denis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1974-1979. He wrote in his diaries that he had been “fairly agnostic” about Britain joining the first step towards monetary union, the Exchange Rate Mechanism, until he discussed it with Manfred Lahnstein, the Permanent Secretary in Germany’s Finance Ministry. Lahnstein explained that he supported the ERM because it was in Germany’s national interest. “His argument was, as always, simple and powerful,” wrote Healey. “The mechanism would require the weaker countries to intervene on the currency markets to keep the stronger currencies down, and vice versa; this meant that France and Italy would have to pay to keep the Deutschmark lower than it would have been in a free market, thus keeping Germany more competitive, and other countries less so.” The euro removed the inconvenience of interventions in the currency markets to secure Germany’s advantage over the rest of the continent. But it still followed Lahnstein’s logic.