The pro-Europeans have lost confidence in their cause, find it difficult to make the case, and have no natural political home since the ruling party, the Conservatives, is in varying degrees Eurosceptic and the post-Blair Labour Party hopes the Euro-boil will lance itself without Labour politicians ever having to make the case for Europe day in, day out. There are no witty, stylish, man-in-the-street pro-Europeans able to take on Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson or Daniel Hannan. Although Lord Sainsbury has helped to finance a beefed-up pro-EU website, Britishinfluence.org, it cannot match the reach of the much better funded anti-European propaganda operations. Business for New Europe has kept the pro-EU flag flying but the anti-EU Business for Britain was launched in April with the redoubtable campaigner and propagandist Matthew Elliott of the Taxpayers' Alliance as its chief executive.

The bad news has never stopped. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of European workers after 2004 had a profound impact. Previously immigrant meant a brown or black face from the old empire. Now the immigrants attacked by UKIP, the BNP, the tabloids and Tory MPs talking about benefit tourists are mostly Christian, white and European. The European Court of Human Rights, much admired when it stood against torture in Turkey or false imprisonment in Russia, became an object of hate when it ruled that like Switzerland Britain should let prisoners vote. As vice-president to Jacques Delors at the EC, Lord Cockfield was a hero when he replaced national regulation and customs to achieve the 1986 Single European Act. But the faintest hint from one of his French or Finnish successors that perhaps, just maybe, the City needs a little more regulation to avoid future RBS or Libor disasters is met with outrage.

The British were never occupied by the Nazis, resisted the Vatican and the Kremlin and would not bow down before the Berlaymont. I explained to my French friends that all these tributaries were coming together into one confluence that would gather in force ahead of the referendum. As a result Britain would leave Europe even if such an outcome was not the declared wish of the Prime Minister and was Ed Miliband's nightmare. Britain, I said, was either the first in Europe or the last. We were last of the big Western European nations to join Europe and would be the first to leave. 

The centrifugal and disintegrative forces in Europe are now such that, while Britain may be the first to say no to the EU as presently constituted, other countries in different ways will also face difficult choices over their European future. It is not what I wish and will be a major defeat for what I think are British interests. But we have reached a point when a plebiscite is more important than parliament and our politicians have lost control of the flow of events. Brexit will take place. What happens after no one knows.