To have been born in Britain in the last 70 years is to be born into a nation in decline. Many people have recognised that. But fewer are reconciled to it and fewer still — at least among the political class — appear to recognise what the sources of that decline are. Even if they do not recognise the problems that arise, perhaps witnessing that we are no longer allowed any way out might concentrate their minds. 

Nothing better defines the current impossibility of reversing the trend of decline than the fact that we no longer have the right to make decisions for ourselves. Until this situation is overturned, our leaders will just have to keep scrambling desperately for whatever temporary face-saving deals they can find.

A country that used to rule the waves now cannot, it transpires, fit an aircraft-carrier with aircraft. Indeed, we cannot afford an aircraft-carrier on our own. Instead, we will shortly have the extraordinary sight of Britain reduced to sharing carriers with France.

If this didn't make you do a double-take when it was announced, things may be worse than I thought. A country with whom Britain has had no strategy in common for centuries is now to own parts of our fleet? And not on a custody-style agreement, where we have the carrier on weekdays, with the French taking it off our hands at weekends. But rather through a fully-fledged, permanent-sharing basis formed on the presumption that, though our interests and those of France have rarely if ever coincided in the past, they will always do so in the future. Not so much an entente cordiale  as a pre-nup.

Every week now we receive a reminder. More than suggestions and more than hints, they are demonstrations that the British people are no longer in control of their own destiny. The noise of Westminster carries on. The noise of government continues. But the action, indeed the direction, is coming from elsewhere. If Britain's slide to the bottom of the second division of global powers is to be halted, we must start by admitting what has been done. And if we are to turn our national life around, then we must first cease to become docile wards of court.