Mrs Merkel’s unsisterly sally before a parliament united in its assumption that Brexit must be based on malice or misunderstanding was playing to a long-standing German prejudice about the British as self-deluding amateurs compared to continental experts, one that long predates Brexit, or even the European Union itself.  A good example is to be found in Hegel’s 1831 essay on the Reform Bill, where he takes the British to task for allowing even a reformed parliament to consist of ignorant foxhunting squires, slick lawyers and others educated merely by newspapers and debates — so inferior to the academic distinction of the bureaucrats who ruled Germany. It may be no exaggeration to see the Hegelian Geist personified in the Selmayrs of our day, still sneering at the successors of Wellington, Peel and Grey.

Mrs May’s dismay was evident in her Downing Street speech a few days later, when she denounced European politicians and officials whose “acts have been deliberately timed to affect the result of the general election”, and who “do not want Britain to prosper”. Her popularity may have soared because of the row with Mr Juncker, but taking on Mrs Merkel is another matter. She is finding out the hard way why a British prime minister needs to understand Germany, and especially German history. Unlike Margaret Thatcher, whose attitudes were shaped by her childhood experience of war and friendship with a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, Mrs May is of a generation that encountered post-war Germany primarily as an economy that had long since overtaken Britain’s: Vorsprung durch Technik. Notoriously, Mrs Thatcher convened a seminar of leading academics at Chequers to inform her about German history. Unhappy with the minute of their discussion prepared by her private secretary Charles (now Lord) Powell, several historians promptly leaked their own highly critical accounts of the Prime Minister’s insurmountable fear of German domination. Mrs May is unlikely to follow her predecessor’s example — she has probably already had enough of leaked accounts of dinners — but she is by all accounts no less thorough than Mrs Thatcher in mastering her brief. An essay is no substitute for such a seminar; at most it may whet the appetite for a deeper encounter with the subject.

We know that German history still matters, because the British keep getting it wrong. Michael Heseltine was only the latest in a long line of politicians to do so when, as Theresa May triggered Article 50 in obedience to last year’s referendum result, he justified his refusal to accept the result by reference to German hegemony: “For someone like myself, it was 1933, the year of my birth, that Hitler was democratically elected in Germany. He unleashed the most horrendous war. This country played a unique role in securing his defeat. So Germany lost the war. We’ve just handed them the opportunity to win the peace. I find that quite unacceptable.”

Lord Heseltine is doing more than stretch a point by his implied analogy between the British referendum and Germany’s March 1933 election. It was that dubious exercise in Nazi “democracy”, notorious for the ubiquity of voter intimidation, which paved the way for Hitler to sweep away all limits on his power with the Enabling Law — though even then he needed the Catholic Centre Party (forerunner of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats) to get a majority. Only a man accustomed to himself being compared to Tarzan would have the chutzpah to compare Brexit to the Third Reich. Even more remarkable, though, was Heseltine’s major premise: that Brexit has “handed [the Germans] the opportunity to win the peace” — in other words, that Britain’s withdrawal will lead to the very German domination of Europe that older generations fought against in the war.