What will enrage, and disorientate, EU elites is the UK’s success outside the Union. Regaining control over our laws, taxes and borders and forging new trade deals while also shedding unnecessary regulation will enhance our competitive advantage over other EU nations. Our superior growth rate, and better growth prospects, will only strengthen. Our attractiveness to inward investors and our influence on the world stage will only grow.

But while this might provoke both angst and even resentment among EU elites, the UK’s success will send a very different message to the EU’s peoples. They will see that a different Europe is possible. It is possible to regain democratic control of your own country and currency, to trade and cooperate with other EU nations without surrendering fundamental sovereignty to a remote and unelected bureaucracy. And, by following that path, your people are richer, your influence for good greater, your future brighter.

So — yes there will be “contagion” if Britain leaves the EU. But what will be catching is democracy. There will be a new demand for more effective institutions to enable the more flexible kind of international cooperation we will need as technological and economic forces transform the world.

We know — from repeated referenda on the continent and in Ireland — that the peoples of the EU are profoundly unhappy with the European project. We also know that the framers of that project — Monnet and Schuman — hoped to advance integration by getting round democracy and never submitting their full vision to the verdict of voters. That approach has characterised the behaviour of EU leaders ever since. But that approach could not, and will not, survive the assertion of deep democratic principle that would be the British people voting to leave.

Our vote to Leave will liberate and strengthen those voices across the EU calling for a different future — those demanding the devolution of powers back from Brussels and desperate for a progressive alternative.

If we vote to leave we will have — in the words of Pitt the Younger — saved our country by our exertions and Europe by our example.

We will have confirmed that we believe our best days lie ahead, that we believe our children can build a better future, that this country’s instincts and institutions, its people and its principles, are capable not just of making our society freer, fairer and richer but also once more of setting an inspirational example to the world.