Since 1997, the Conservative Party under William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and now David Cameron has been uniformly Eurosceptic. Even if the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary had to drop the scorn and open contempt for Europe they showed in their years in opposition, Mr Cameron has promoted avowed Eurosceptics to senior cabinet jobs. To be openly pro-European on the Tory benches since 2005 has been almost as rare as a woman cardinal electing a pope in Rome.

Like a court jester, Ken Clarke has been kept on, but no one is fooled that his presence dilutes the notion promoted by the generation of Margaret Thatcher's children and protégés that Europe is a succubus from which a vigorous, free trade Britain focused on Conrad Black's Anglosphere, China and the other emerging markets needs to free itself.

The Europe that Britain joined in 1973 grew at nearly twice the rate of the UK. Until the fall of  the Berlin Wall, and the abrupt halt to German growth after the country absorbed the dead weight of bankrupt Communist East Germany, the EU seemed a better place to do business than Britain. Then Thatchernomics and the deft way Blair and Brown incorporated deregulation, market opening and globalisation into Labour's governing progamme (until the 2007-08 banking collapse) meant that for the first time since 1950 Britain was outperforming European economies. Who then needed Europe, all the more so as the enduring eurozone crisis was held up in Britain as a disaster? Britain's membership of the EU "is like being shackled to a corpse", declared the Eurosceptic Tory MP Douglas Carswell in October.

He and Daniel Hannan and the irrepressible Boris Johnson all enjoy dancing on the EU's grave. The gravedigger-in-chief, Nigel Farage, seems to have become a BBC staffer as the broadcasters employ him 24/7 to use his vivid language to trash Europe.  In France, the anti-Europeans are hard, unforgiving, far-Right politicians like Le Pen, père et fille, or demagogic lefties like Jean-Luc Mélanchon. In Britain, the Eurosceptics are graduates of Have I Got News for You and use direct, vernacular English. They have all the press on their side, especially the offshore owned news media. Even the culturally pro-European Guardian opposed the euro and anti-European columnists outnumber the dwindling pro-European writers by ten to one. The Guardian's pro-European sage, Hugo Young, was replaced after his death by the scornful Eurosceptic Sir Simon Jenkins, and only the Financial Times, unread outside City boardrooms, found a little space for pro-European veterans like Sir Geoffrey Howe or Sir Peter Sutherland occasionally to make the case for Europe.